Having written, directed and acted in films in his native Germany throughout the ’20s, Dieterle settled in comfortably as a contract director for Warner Bros. He remained there for nearly a decade, carving a name for himself with a string of acclaimed biopics, including the 1937 Academy Award-winning Best Picture The Life of Emile Zola. Freelancing for RKO in 1939, he helmed what is widely considered a screen classic, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, then left Warners in 1940 to form his own production company, his first feature being The Devil and Daniel Webster. Eventually, he reunited with former Warner Bros. producer Hal Wallis, who had established a unit at Paramount; his late-’40s output yielded such romantic dramas as Love Letters and Portrait of Jennie and such crime thrillers (what we now call “noir”) as The Accused. But Dieterle’s early decry of fascism (he and his wife assisted countless compatriots in fleeing Nazi Germany) — not to mention the leftist leanings of many of his films — led him to face McCarthyist censure in 1947. Assignments became scarcer, and in the late ’50s he chose to finish out his career in his native Germany. But he left behind 52 Hollywood films — many of them Oscar contenders cherished by audiences at the time — and a host of critical raves that rivaled those of his contemporaries.
And then the rewriting of history began.
I don’t know if one can dissect the career of William Dieterle — or more specifically, bemoan the fact that his name doesn’t enjoy wider recognition — without discussing the auteur theory. After World War II, France was in such financial ruin — and film budgets at such a premium — that directors were forced to scrape by on very little; their work became more personal, a consequence of them having few tools at their disposal other than their own imaginations. The French saw fit to praise them as “auteurs” (i.e, authors) because they exerted far more influence over their films than pre-war directors. Theoretician André Bazin had already suggested that the best films bear their maker’s “signature”; in 1954, critic François Truffaut went so far as to insist that the director is the true author of a film. (Truffaut directed his first short that same year, so was his position perhaps a bit self-serving?) And in 1962, American film critic Andrew Sarris took it a step further; he came up with an auteur theory, a set of standards that he claimed boosted certain directors above their lowlier colleagues. Three criteria had to be met: “the technical competence of a director... the distinguishable personality of the director... [and] tension between a director's personality and his material.”
It’s easy to punch holes in Sarris’s “theory.” To the first point, there are filmmakers whose technique is suspect, but whose passion and instincts more than compensate. To the third point, the assertion that great art is produced by friction between the director and external forces prompts Sarris to deny the designation of “auteur” to quite a few writer-directors (counterintuitive as that sounds), because they never faced the challenge of shooting a script they thought was unsalvageable. But it’s the second point that’s most problematic. In the Golden Age of Hollywood, studios enforced a house style. The best directors were able to superimpose their own aesthetic, but it often takes a vast familiarity with their work to spot it. A “distinguishable personality” is more easily spied in the overuse of certain tropes — but is that emblematic of a great artist? Even Sarris himself falls into this trap, centering his theory around an anecdote that’s almost laughable. In Raoul Walsh’s 1935 film Every Night at Eight (which Sarris dubs “one of the many maddeningly routine films Walsh has directed”), a character talks in his sleep, revealing his deep feelings for — and ultimately to — the woman he loves; in 1941's High Sierra, also directed by Walsh, the same sort of incident occurs. And according to Sarris, “If I had not been aware of Walsh in Every Night at Eight, the crucial link to High Sierra would have passed unnoticed. Such are the joys of the auteur theory.” Let that sink in. Sarris wouldn’t have noticed that both films contained a similar scene without the existence of his “auteur theory.” And furthermore, according to Sarris, the mere presence of these two scenes — neither of which Walsh is known to have had a hand in scripting — earns the director of “many maddeningly routine films” the lofty title of “auteur.” It’s enough to make you forswear film criticism altogether. (The flaws in Sarris’s theory explain why, more than a half century later, no two people can seemingly agree on the definition of an auteur — or if it’s a valid or even worthwhile term to begin with. It also means that directors are often proclaimed auteurs merely because of their love or overuse of a motif: everything from John Ford’s affection for Monument Valley to John Woo’s fondness for white doves.)
But what about the directors who didn’t make the cut? Well, in that case, Sarris saw fit to not only ignore but denigrate their work. (The club had to be kept exclusive, after all.) And thus you find him minimizing the impact of William Dieterle — whose talents had been hailed by critics, audiences and the Academy alike, and who was commonly seen as one of the filmmakers who helped revolutionize Hollywood — with almost calculated perversity: “Dieterle was around on the set when many interesting things happened over the years, and it is reasonable to assume that he had something to do with them." This is Sarris in 1968, and this is the auteur theory at its worst. Sarris, certain that Dieterle fails his litmus test, feels obliged to deny him all agency. And because few of Dieterle’s films were at that time available for viewing, the disregard for Dieterle displayed by Sarris and his followers snowballed, as a new generation of critics mischaracterized his work with bizarre claims, backhanded compliments and outright inaccuracies:
”During the 30s Dieterle was mostly respected for his pedantic technical proficiency." — The Film Encyclopedia"Though a minor, erratic talent, Dieterle is deserving of more serious critical attention." — Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision)
"His films from 1953 [vie] with each other for awfulness." — David Quinlan (Illustrated Guide to Film Directors)
(Dieterle made only one film in 1953.)
When I started to delve more deeply into vintage film in my 40’s, I was aghast to learn that a Classic Hollywood director whom I so admired was being summarily dismissed — and with almost focused intensity. But Dieterle’s work had been trapped in limbo. Because he hadn’t been tagged as someone worthy of attention, viewers hadn’t rushed to seek him out; because audiences were apathetic, studios hadn’t prioritized his films for home video release. But the tide started to turn in 2012, with a “Forbidden Hollywood” collection that included three rare Dieterle items. And as good reviews and solid sales prompted more Dieterle titles to hit the market, critics who were able to watch the movies their predecessors merely passed judgment on could draw their own conclusions. And did. In most everything you see written about Dieterle in the last decade, you see writers railing against the old characterizations. You now see labels like “genius,” “master,” “stylist” and “visionary” applied. But I haven’t seen anyone take a formal look at Dieterle’s Hollywood career and give it its due. So permit me to make the case for William Dieterle.
Wilhelm Dieterle was one of a number of European actors lured to Hollywood in 1930. With the coming of sound, studios were determined not to lose the all-important overseas market, so they took to assembling foreign casts on the sets of their most popular films and shooting alternate-language versions. Dieterle was engaged by Warner Bros. to act in their German editions, but once on set, the project supervisor — aware of Dieterle’s expertise behind the camera — eased him into the director’s chair. When the foreign-language experiment fizzled a year later, Warners offered him a directing contract, anglicizing his name to “William.”
Given the frivolous works Warners eventually assigned him to, it’s startling where they let him start: with an ambitious exploration of Fitzgerald’s “lost generation,” THE LAST FLIGHT (1931). John Monk Saunders’ screenplay — based on his novel Single Lady — follows four American fliers injured in action in World War I, as they try to chart a path forward. Their doctor urges them to “take the first boat home,” but none of them can envision a return stateside. Their nervous systems are damaged, their bodies broken. David Manners, whose spasmodic twitching of the muscles under his eye only recedes when he drinks, suggests a different plan: “Get tight!” — and when fellow pilot Richard Barthelmess asks, “And then what?”, the answer is obvious: “Stay tight.” So they recruit two more ex-fliers (Johnny Mack Brown and Elliott Nugent) and head to Paris, a haven for vets and expats — and when we rejoin the four of them a year later, they’re dressed to the nines and strolling the boulevard. Barthelmess suggests, “How about a cocktail?”, but the question is clearly rhetorical — as much a part of their nightly ritual as the consumption to come.
Despite the shoot being studio bound, Dieterle captures the look and feel of Paris during les années folles, when nights had no meaning — when thirsty vets could migrate from hotel bar to outdoor café to dance hall, downing martinis each step of the way. Then a few hours of shut-eye, a prairie oyster to get them back on their feet, and another day of drinking. Dieterle captures the ex-fliers’ exploits in fast pans and slow crossfades — interspersed with surprising shifts of perspective — that mirror their slightly benumbed state. Everything seems narrowly out of focus, yet a bit too real; they’ve forgotten everything except how to force a good time. Even common courtesies escape them. When they meet a young woman (Helen Chandler) at a bar, they act like kids on a playground, like boys ganging up on the girl they secretly like. They tease her about her teeth, her nose, the fact that instead of a martini, she opts for a champagne cocktail. They lecture her for being ignorant of their frailties, then they denounce her for caring too much — because her caring interrupts their revelry and their reverie. But she’s a lost soul, too, an expat escaping the clutches of a domineering mother and family obligations, and her independence — the fact that she still has control over her life — makes her fascinating to them: the specimen they can’t help but stare at.
Chandler gives the film its spark. She’s ditzy and dear and given to fits of dramatics, but there’s something disturbingly sanguine about her. (When discovered, she’s holding a champagne glass containing a man’s false teeth, simply because he asked her to — and nothing will persuade her to abandon her post. We later discover she keeps turtles in her bathtub.) The fliers chaperone her, they banter with her, they even bunk with her, but as intimate as it gets — Johnny Mack Brown helps scrub her back — there’s no danger of anything inappropriate. They’ve given up pursuits of any kind. Their only mission now is one of constant inebriation — and the camaraderie that results. The veterans have developed verbal routines that amuse them; Chandler speaks in her own shorthand — steeped in logic only she understands — and sometimes the conversations seem like a string of non sequiturs that no one has the need or inclination to decipher.
But Chandler — for all the ways she fits with the foursome — is capable of letting down her guard, something the fliers find impossible to do. She asks Barthelmess — whose hands were severely burned in a crash — about Minnesota, where he grew up, and if he was happy there, and the most he’s willing to concede is “I think so.” The past is vague, tenuous, discomfiting. The vets feel disconnected from everything that’s come before; being near death is about the only thing that feels familiar — whether they’re haunting a graveyard or crashing a bullfight. An air of melancholy hangs over the film, but also one of inevitability; the fliers are heading down a dangerous path that they haven’t the clarity to see. That lack of clarity is something Dieterle had an aptitude for capturing on film. He empathized with his characters’ inability to fully understand the situation they’d found themselves in, and the damage they were inflicting — and he never judged them for rationalizing their own bad behavior. (See September Affair, 1950.) Here, the fliers are terrified of feeling something again — so they try to drink it away, and when that won’t do the trick, they run from it. (And in a sense, they’re right to run, because it’s Chandler’s sincerity — her incapacity not to care — that hastens their demise.) And so they remain trapped in a fever dream that only alcohol can cool and cleanse.
The Last Flight was applauded by critics (The New York Times found it “a brilliant study of the post-war psychology of four injured American aviators”) and — upon its rediscovery in the ’70s — pronounced a forgotten masterpiece. It demonstrated Dieterle’s gift for emotional engagement; his next film showed he had the technical chops to match. Out of print for nearly 50 years after its initial release, HER MAJESTY, LOVE is one of several Dieterle films to be mischaracterized by secondhand sources; for one thing, even a cursory look gives lie to the way historians have long depicted the movies of Marilyn Miller. Miller was a top Broadway star whose time in Hollywood was short-lived. Her first feature was a straightforward adaptation of her 1920 Broadway musical Sally, replete with members of the original company and road tour. It was a huge hit, and because it was a huge hit, authors a half century later — few of whom had seen the film — postured that it must have been wonderful. Her next effort, based on her stage success Sunny, proved less potent at the box office, so those same writers presumed that it was less viable a vehicle. And because few of them had even heard of (much less seen) Her Majesty, Love, and merely knew that it was Miller’s final film, they concluded it was a turkey: decisive proof that her talents didn’t translate to the screen.
Of course, now that we can actually see the three films, we realize everything we’ve been taught is untrue. Sally, pretty much lifted from the Broadway stage, is a good example of a Twenties musical — but it’s a dreadful movie. It’s sickly and static. (And Miller’s every movement is calculated; there doesn’t seem to be an ounce of spontaneity left in her.) Theatre mavens lavish praise on it for essentially filming the Broadway show intact, but its transfer to film only serves to reinforce why movie musicals became anathema in 1930 and ’31. With the coming of talkies, Broadway musicals were being optioned by the dozens, but they weren’t being reimagined for the screen. Sally doing big box office doesn’t mean that Sally was good; Sally doing big box office and Miller’s next two films bombing means that the curiosity factor was high, but the film was a dud. You think if audiences thought Miller was all that in Sally, the tepid reviews for Sunny would have kept them away? They steered clear of Sunny because they feared having to sit through another Sally.
But Her Majesty, Love — her only original screen musical — refutes the claim that Miller didn’t have what it takes to be a movie star. For the first and only time, we understand what might have been. Dieterle gives her wit and a bite that are nowhere to be found in Sally or Sunny. She’s broad across the shoulders; no longer a cloying innocent, she has toughness and vitality, and when she expresses her rage midway through by overturning a banquet table (her fiancé has thrown her over, so she overturns a table), the moment re-energizes both the film and her career. We suddenly get who she is — and how she’s unlike anyone on the silver screen. She’s the ingenue who overturns banquet tables. (Perhaps the reason Warners canceled her contract after this film is — oh, I don’t know — because she refused to keep sleeping with studio head Jack Warner? We know more now than we did then.) But as good as Miller is, it’s Dieterle who takes your breath away. He sweeps across ballrooms and boardrooms: taking in each attendee, pausing just long enough to register their eccentricities. At one point, he follows some cast-off flowers out a second-story window. Such technique was trailblazing in 1931, when cameras had only recently been released from the soundproof cabinets in which they’d been imprisoned when talkies overtook Hollywood. In The New York Times, critic Mordaunt Hall credited him for the film’s success, declaring that Dieterle “wins top honors in Her Majesty, Love, a breezy little affair ….. Mr. Dieterle’s direction of The Last Flight revealed him as a stylist, but here he accomplishes even greater wonders by his joyous manipulation of the camera.” Hall deemed his artistry “astounding.”
The opening scene is a dazzler, as Dieterle glides across a Berlin cabaret, tracking the festivities with precision masquerading as abandon — before coming to rest on the lady behind the bar, and the three elderly suitors making their pitch in song. There seem to be no limits to what Dieterle’s camera can do (it tilts, whirls and pivots), nor to how many sounds he can capture at once, and cleanly — and in 1931, that was unheard of. Dieterle seems as energized as Miller. When one scene ends, he fastens on a visual image that eases you into the next. Ball bearings in an office become bundt cakes at a banquet. Papers flying become pigeons flapping; broken dishes become solitaire cards. It’s a lightweight vehicle compared to The Last Flight, but Dieterle never condescends to it. The love story between Miller and onscreen beau Ben Lyon seems genuine; the affection between W.C. Fields and Miller — as father and daughter — feels real; even the competitiveness between Lyon and his brother (Ford Sterling) convinces. The relationships feel uncommonly rich for a carefree musical of this period. Dieterle’s particularly good with romance: a quality that will become one of his defining traits. For all of the script’s inadequacies — for all the key moments glossed over — Dieterle sees to it that you believe in Miller and Lyon’s shared destiny, even after he betrays her to secure a promotion. Dieterle stresses Lyon’s misery over his error in judgment and Miller’s embarrassment at her overreaction (see “banquet table,” above); he convinces you of the pair’s commitment to each other, even when the screenwriters leave it unexpressed. And thus when the lovers ultimately reunite — in a tour-de-force of direction and design — you’re swept away on a cloud of bliss.
Warner Bros. assigned Dieterle to five films in 1932. In an interview with Tom Flinn some 40 years later, he recalled that when he started at the studio, “There were ten directors ahead of me ….. They had to make about 60 pictures a year in those days. All could not be top stories, that's obvious. There must be ‘B’ pictures. So naturally the newcomer gets the ‘B’ pictures.” Dieterle’s recollections seem in no way hyperbolic; of contract directors at Warners, certainly Mervyn LeRoy (who was dating studio co-founder Harry Warner’s daughter Doris) and Michael Curtiz (who played polo regularly with production head Darryl Zanuck) had seniority over Dieterle, but so did Raoul Walsh, Alfred E. Green, William Keighley, William Wellman, Roy Del Ruth, Lloyd Bacon, Alan Crosland and Archie Mayo. Most of the pictures he was handed between 1932 and 1934 were programmers, even if they featured some of the studio’s biggest headliners; of the dozen films he directed for Warners during that three-year period, most came in under 70 minutes, and two under an hour. But several of them — in that first year, especially — were stupendous.
Take his next film, MAN WANTED. Turner Classic Movies summarizes the plot as “a female executive falls in love with her male secretary.” Most sites do. They‘ve got it backwards: Man Wanted is about a male secretary who falls in love with his (married) female boss. And it’s about how he handles it: the power dynamics, the sexual frustration (which he takes out, rather disturbingly, on his fiancée). Kay Francis had frequent tantrums on the set, accusing David Manners of trying to steal the film from her — but it’s his film to steal. Although Francis has the showier role — a Manhattan magazine editor who flirts with and even harasses her assistant (she’s trapped in an untraditional marriage and craves validation) — Manners’ secretary is the one who’s put through the wringer. There’s no more startling juxtaposition of images in Man Wanted than Manners’ train ride to and from Sag Harbor (where Francis has summoned him for work). On the ride there, we see him relaxed and reading a newspaper: ready to make his mark, or maybe his move. On the ride home, after stealing a kiss from his boss — and barely making an impression — he’s tightly coiled, his feet propped on the seat in front of him: radiating such self-loathing that, when a man contemplates sitting beside him, Manners’ manner drives him away. They’re brief scenes — maybe 10 seconds each, both wordless — and they may well have been added by Dieterle to deepen the character beats and improve the flow. (It’s the sort of thing he’d do often.) But they’re striking in their compactness: detailing Manners’ inner torment in quick, shrewd strokes.
Cinematographer Gregg Toland was a freelancer at the start of a remarkable career; art director Anton Grot was a Warners stalwart typically assigned their more prestigious pics. (Each would ultimately garner five Oscar nods.) Warners entrusted Dieterle with a top-flight team, and he took full advantage. Francis’s office is a stunning study in Art Deco: the circular recessed bookshelves, the double-fluted sconces, the bronze and gold sculptures of the female form, of varying sizes — including an ivory figurine embedded in the facade of Francis’s desk. (In the opening scene, Francis’s husband admires her newly redecorated office, but Dieterle is careful not to let us see it yet. He unveils it upon Manners’ first visit, so we view it through his eyes.) The design offers insights into how the characters see the world — and themselves. The office seems an extension of Francis’s onscreen persona; Dieterle positions her perched among her possessions, her own curves complementing theirs. The spaces where her husband’s friends revel are almost aggressively spacious, as if their wealth and privilege know no bounds. But when Manners is in his drab apartment, torn up over his love for an unavailable woman, Toland and Dieterle blot out half the screen and frame him in a windowsill, lit by the lamps from the street below — illuminating his isolation.
Toland had helped develop a tool that muted the whir of the camera and allowed it to roam more freely; he and Dieterle — who sought to keep his shots as agile as possible — prove a perfect match. (“Camera technique,” Dieterle would say, “is what diction is to the writer — the director's style of expression.”) Grot’s sets are often multi-tiered, and Toland makes the most of them: Francis appearing on the balcony of her second-floor bedroom to urge the partygoers below to let her sleep (“Would you play bridge or make love or something?”); a dance band — at a club where Manners takes fiancée Una Merkel to quench his thirst — that’s almost magically perched among the partygoers. There’s even a simulated crane shot that glides from a third-floor suite in the Sag Harbor hotel (where Francis and Manners are working late) out the balcony and down the facade of the building, until we reach the patio of a ground-floor ballroom — at which point the camera sweeps inside to join the festivities. The look of Man Wanted is as trendsetting as its gender-bending plot. The pre-Code film that gets all the credit for empowering women is the Ruth Chatterton starrer Female (which Dieterle directed the first nine days of, before pulling out due to illness), with Chatterton also the head of a family business. Female suffers from a troubling second half, in which the leading lady’s epiphany about her priorities (all she desires is to be a dutiful wife) belies any feminist statement. Here, Francis remains in charge of her destiny to the end: as impressive as any man who charts a winning course for his company — and as objectionable as any man who thinks he can bully his employees into submission.
Man Wanted doesn’t get enough attention. Dieterle’s next film — also with Francis — gets too much. JEWEL ROBBERY, Francis’s fifth screen pairing with William Powell, is frivolous and licentious — everything that lovers of pre-Code films hope for; it’s just not very good. Warner Bros. purchased a flop Broadway play and trimmed it to a measly 68 minutes; small wonder it feels skeletal. A bored baron’s wife who yearns for excitement finds it with a jewel thief, and — and that’s it. Francis has a sweet scene early on where she confesses her self-loathing to her lover (Hardie Albright), describing the gulf between how she sees herself and how she wishes she did — but the film never bridges it. Powell’s robber doesn’t unleash anything unexpected in Francis, nor she in him. Instead, the script strands Francis playing alternately wide-eyed and bug-eyed (not a look that flatters her), and although Dieterle knows how to enliven the proceedings, he can’t figure out how to enrich them. Dieterle later admitted that he was interested in the film only because of the chance to work with Powell, whom he revered; ironically, his reunion with Powell later that year, on LAWYER MAN, is saddled with the single worst script that Dieterle directed during his time in Hollywood — and not coincidentally, his dullest work for Warners. It also contains the only dismal Powell performance I’ve seen. He’s a lawyer from a poor neighborhood who decides to pursue a job in a well-heeled D.A.’s office — then runs afoul of the mob. The script forces Powell to switch gears so many times, he grows visibly frustrated; after a while, he seems to summon resolve by pushing his lines through his adenoids. His panting after pretty Claire Dodd is cringeworthy — and what can you make of a film where the key courtroom scene is left unseen, glimpsed only by passersby in the hallway?
But sandwiched between Jewel Robbery and Lawyer Man come three fascinating — and largely forgotten — films. Warners touted THE CRASH as “the first great picturization of the havoc caused to the idle rich by the most dramatic financial catastrophe of our time.” But as staff writer Earl Baldwin conceives them, lead couple Linda and Geoffrey Gault are too precisely drawn to serve as a cross-section of (high) society. They met and married when they had nothing, but she was so anxious to escape her life of poverty that he proposed she befriend wealthy men for stock market tips — and turn them over to him. And that’s how they’ve built their fortune. The time she’s spent flirting and bartering with men who mean nothing to her has left her bored and bitter; wondering how far his wife is willing to go for the information he demands of her has turned him jealous and jaded. They’ve gotten everything they wanted, but they’ve destroyed their marriage in the process. (“What’s the matter with us anyway?” he bemoans: “Seems to me the more money we make, the more wretched we are.”) But they’re forced to reevaluate when she manufactures a stock market tip during a crucial week in 1929 — rather than subject herself to one more humiliation — and they’re wiped out in the crash.
Ruth Chatterton — like Kay Francis and William Powell — had been recently poached from Paramount, and Warners was determined to capitalize on her popularity. The trailer found costar (and future husband) George Brent addressing the audience directly: “Miss Chatterton, in my opinion, gives the finest portrayal of her entire career.” It’s standard studio hype, but it’s also close to the truth. Chatterton’s Linda Gault thinks the world revolves around her, and that’s how Dieterle shoots it. She’s the axis around whom everyone’s life spins, and the staging and camerawork turn that into a kind of visual poetry. The other characters keep orbiting her, unconsciously, and so does cinematographer Ernest Haller. She’s immersed in herself, and so is the film, and as a result, you get deeper into Chatterton’s character — and into her acting abilities — than in perhaps any other vehicle. Decked out in two dozen Orry-Kelly gowns, she’s coy and calculating, proud and pouty and altogether irresistible. You’re entertained by Linda’s gift for self-preservation and her sly knowledge of how to use her charm and appeal. By her ability to be at once self-mocking, reflective and provocative. Both her sad self-awareness and her eager obliviousness prove endearing. Chatterton’s degree of character complexity — and her willingness to embrace ambiguity — were such a departure for the era that critics were baffled; they were used to seeing emotions parceled out one at a time, a tradition passed down from the silents. Variety dismissed Linda as “an inconsistent woman type” who “never makes up her mind whether she’s a Becky Sharpe [sic] for clever intrigue or a loyal wife for self-sacrifice” — as if the two were mutually exclusive. (The critic unwittingly admitted that his view of women had been shaped entirely by the movies, conceding, “The character may be true to life.”) Chatterton changes intent mid-sentence; emotions come in waves, breaking unexpectedly. It all feels astonishingly modern: a tour-de-force quite unlike any I can think of from the early sound years.
Dieterle knows when to go in for a close-up and let a realization ripple across Chatterton’s face. Or to hold on a close-up as her character switches tactics, almost instinctually. When Linda escapes to Bermuda, fearful of facing the sale of her home, she meets an Australian sheep herder at the boarding house where she’s taken residence. When he tells her a bit of his life story — how he lost his money in the war and then rebuilt — she responds, “I’m glad to know what one does when one goes broke. So that’s it. You raise sheep.” We can’t tell if she’s being ironic or irreverent or flirtatious; what we do now is that Linda’s chosen her next mark — even if she herself is unaware of it. There’s a remarkable scene when — after weeks with Linda — her sheep herder develops cold feet. When she arrives at his room to set things right, Dieterle positions his camera outside the window and catches each of them through a different pane, a visual manifestation of their impasse. (Dieterle loved shooting through windows — not just for variety, but as a reminder that the camera was giving us access to the most intimate of exchanges.) As she strives to get back in his good graces, she works every angle, and so does Dieterle, accentuating each step of her seduction. Finally, she makes her way to the bed, knowing full well he’ll follow; she launches into recollections of the humiliations she suffered as a child, and they end up in a clinch. Her sob story — which we hear variations on throughout the film — sounds sincere: one of those devices screenwriters indulge in to garner their less savory characters some sympathy. But this time, Chatterton is careful to let us see her play-acting. She does it so subtly that we believe her suitor doesn’t see it. But we do — yet we remain as captivated as he is. We’re captivated in a different way. Despite the apparent artifice, how much of her story is on the level? Does she believe what she’s saying, or does she just know that it works? We admire Linda for being so very good at what she does. Even when men see through her machinations, they can’t resist her. We understand: we’re powerless too.
Baldwin based his screenplay on a novel by Larry Barretto, and the chain of events — the codependency that develops between Linda and Geoffrey; Linda’s frank yet artful manipulation of her Australian suitor; her maid and her husband’s willingness to resort to larceny and blackmail, respectively, to get back what they’ve lost — are gratifyingly adult. But they’re never sensationalized. And that makes The Crash the unlikeliest of Chatterton vehicles; it eschews the melodramatics that anchor her signature films (Madame X, Anybody’s Woman and the aforementioned Female). Like so much of Dieterle, it holds its passions in check, but grows all the more absorbing for doing so. There are seductions and shady deals, rebuffs and recriminations. But there are no big altercations. No voices are raised. Dieterle’s insistence on restraint — which Chatterton so readily adopts — is part of what makes the film seem so timeless; it avoids the histrionics common to the era. And it’s what makes it endlessly rewatchable. At just 56 minutes, it plays like a short story by Maupassant or, a century later, by John Cheever, where the plot is merely a mechanism for character exploration — although Dieterle makes room for a surprising amount of plot. (His attention to detail is outrageous. When Linda first meets her sheep herder in Bermuda, she wastes no time getting him to put down the book he’s reading and focus on her. The book, which we only glimpse in one quick shot when he sets it down to talk to her? Antic Hay, Aldous Huxley’s exposé of the self-absorbed cultural elite.) None of his contemporaries at Warner Bros. could have tackled this assignment as Dieterle did; he created a quiet classic.
As opposed to SCARLET DAWN, which makes some noise. At first glance, it’s like a CliffsNotes account of the Russian Revolution — and not even a decent CliffsNotes account. The events of 1917 and 1918 are condensed into a handful of headlines, which summarize events with almost perverse inaccuracy. (“Communists Stage Demonstration Despite Tzar’s Denial of Revolutionary Rumors,” proclaims one newspaper. The eight months between the abdication of Nicholas II and the Bolshevik revolt are altogether ignored.) Dieterle reported late in life that this lavish historical film “might’ve helped me a lot,” but that he started filming with only 10 pages of script — and additional pages trickled in a few at a time. But you never sense Dieterle’s frustration; he pours himself into the project like he’s been handed the richest of romantic epics. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is Baron Nikita Krasnoff, a Russian aristocrat forced to flee to Constantinople; Nancy Carroll is his servant girl Tanyusha, who insists on making the journey with him; and Lilyan Tashman is the courtesan who commands Nikita’s attention during his time in Moscow and reappears late in the story to suggest how he can cash in on his name and family history. Some of the transitions — like the development of Nikita and Tanyusha’s relationship — are glossed over completely by scenarists Niven Busch and Erwin Gelsey. But when Dieterle has nothing to work with, he calls upon his silent film training and improvises magnificently. He counteracts the inept headlines at the top with rousing newsreel footage of Russian troops — we even get a glimpse of Nicholas II himself — and as tensions rise, he splices in effective shots of the rioting populace. And when Nikita returns from military maneuvers in the opening reel, anticipating the indulgences to come, Dieterle — with no script pages to guide him — sets that debauchery up on the screen in the form of a bacchanal that seems racy even by pre-Code standards.
Anton Grot was the art director and Ernest Haller the cinematographer. They were Warners’ A team, and as much as you’re aware that you’re not watching a big-budget feature (the film clocks in at 58 minutes), Dieterle, Grot and Haller keep convincing you otherwise. One of the few failings of The Crash is that art director Jack Okey fills the sets with so much furniture, the rooms stop looking sumptuous; they simply look cluttered. (For a plot that culminates in the discovery that Geoffrey saved all of Linda’s favorite pieces when he sold their home, it’s a little distressing when you don’t recognize a single one.) Grot was the rare art director who knew how to use a minimum of furnishings and props to maximum effect. He conveys Nikita’s affluence through a few well-chosen items, and Dieterle and Haller treat them impressionistically. When Tanyusha is attending to Nikita, she’s frequently situated off center. An easel with an oil painting atop it might be opposite her, a cameo lamp with beaded shade between them. It reflects how Tanyusha sees herself, as no more than a possession — but it’s also how Nikita views his life, with his most precious assets (including his servants) in perfect balance. When the revolution comes, and soldiers arrive to strip Nikita of his wealth, then he is positioned among (and often dwarfed by) his belongings, emphasizing the enormity of his loss. (The first time we catch Fairbanks alone onscreen, his house has been emptied out, and he’s left to survey the damage. His unadorned profile speaks to his desolation.) Of all of Dieterle’s Hollywood titles, Scarlet Dawn comes closest to a silent film (sequences fly by with barely a word); it’s also the first where you’re tempted to ignore the lines and simply stare at the screen — not just for the beauty of the images, but for the information they convey. The script may be skeletal, but Dieterle fills in all the missing pieces.
Even in its formative stages, Dieterle knew that Nikita and Tanyusha’s burgeoning romance would be the cornerstone of the film. But as pages came in, the writers were focusing on action scenes instead. So Dieterle took it upon himself to chart the relationship in its earliest stages. On Nikita’s first day of military leave, Tanyusha brings him breakfast in bed. He entreats her to come closer, grabs her by the ankle and flips her onto the mattress. Is it horseplay or harassment? It’s hard to say. Near the end of his leave, when Nikita receives a call from his lady friend, Tanyusha brings him the phone, then stands holding the handset a few feet from the bed where he’s lounging — until he playfully uses the phone cord to reel her in. (This time, she offers no objections.) Nikita is always on the make, but in the ways he moderates his methods of seduction, in the softening of Tanyusha’s responses to him, and in the deference he displays during their tortuous trip to Constantinople, you see Dieterle, Fairbanks and Carroll laying the groundwork for the love affair to come. And at the midway mark, the writers catch up to the rest of the creative team. Nikita shows up at their one-room flat with a wedding dress, and Tanyusha rushes to try it on behind the semi-sheer sheet she’s erected to provide some privacy (two years before Gable and Colbert did their own variation in It Happened One Night). And in the succession of scenes that follow — the pair’s humbled introduction to the priest who will be performing the ceremony; Nikita’s search through the streets for witnesses (he winds up with a French streetwalker and a German shopkeeper, neither certain what they’re being asked to do, but both swayed by his enthusiasm); and the vows showered in candlelight, the cathedral serving as the most extravagant yet solemn of backdrops — you see the relationship truly blossom, and the characters evolve as a result. Tanyusha gains ease and gravitas, while Nikita acquires selflessness and drive. During their wedding supper — a loaf of bread, a link of salami and a bottle of wine: all the impoverished couple can afford — Nikita explains the origin of clinking glasses when you toast, and you find yourself listening as attentively as Tanyusha. And by the time he’s taken a job to provide for his new wife, one far beneath his former station — washing dishes at a restaurant, while angling for a promotion to busboy — you’re actively cheering the couple on.
It’s hard to imagine who in 1932 could’ve pulled off the role of Nikita like Fairbanks. In his autobiography, Fairbanks recalled enjoying Scarlet Dawn as “an exercise in narcissism — and escapism.” He based his performance on another he greatly admired: John Gilbert’s star-making turn as Prince Danilo Petrovich in The Merry Widow (1925), going so far as to shave the sides of his head to simulate the look. But he never loses himself in the transformation. 1932 was a banner year for Fairbanks, with the stirring Union Depot and the sly It’s Tough to Be Famous — plus the overrated but affable Love Is a Racket. Scarlet Dawn is often treated as the runt of the litter, but it’s an unfair label. Dieterle weaves a powerful magic, and the love story has unexpected staying power. And Carroll, with her porcelain-doll features, never lets Tanyusha become a doormat or dimwit; she’s eager and suggestible simply because her head hasn’t been cluttered with facts. (See Love Letters, 1945.) Dieterle understands the qualities needed to establish the pair as a viable couple — and one whose reconciliation in the final reel you root for. And even though that reunion occurs about 10 seconds from the end, he knows what buttons to push to make the moment satisfying. As the screenwriters imagine it, Nikita stops himself at the culmination of a long con — one that’s prompted him to abandon Nikita — because he suddenly fears for her safety: a weak resolution at best. As Dieterle expands on it, Nikita follows up by hunting the streets of Constantinople for his missing wife: banging on gates, racing through hospital rooms, rushing blindly into alleyways — his firmness of purpose growing so ferocious, the police have to drag him off — and still he won’t be stilled. It’s a stirring sequence. Dieterle’s gift for illustrative storytelling made an effortless transition from silent films to talkies. (In his book American Directors, film historian Jean-Pierre Coursodon argues that Dieterle’s expressive camera movements were partial compensation for his shaky grasp of English. I can’t disagree with his assertion, but it overlooks the fact that for Dieterle, expressive camerawork was more often than not tied to the workings of the human heart.)
In between The Crash and Scarlet Dawn, Dieterle accepted a free-lance assignment at Fox Film. As critic and historian Dave Kehr has noted, “Fox was known as the directors' studio. Directors got a lot of leeway there, a lot of freedom to make things they wanted to make, in the way they wanted to make them.” And indeed, in the three films that Dieterle did at Fox — 6 Hours to Live in 1932, Adorable and The Devil’s in Love in 1933 — his sense of liberation is palpable. 6 HOURS TO LIVE is an uncommon blend of continental romance (which suitor will Baroness Miriam Jordan choose: Warner Baxter or John Boles?), political intrigue (who tried to assassinate the sole holdout to a trade agreement?) and horror (can a scientist really reanimate a human corpse?). The pacing is more deliberate than anything we’ve seen from Dieterle — at times almost languorous. At the 55-minute mark, when his bosses at Warner Bros. would have been instructing him to wrap it up, he sets Baxter — a politician who’s never connected with the constituents he’s sworn to serve — on a metaphysical journey: delving into issues of morality, the nature of existence, and the benefits of believing in a higher power. (He comes to realize that his idealism has denied him empathy; all the work he’s done on behalf of the people hasn’t given them the kind of hope they need.) It’s the first time since The Last Flight that you sense Dieterle engaged not merely by the filmic possibilities of a project, but by its humanistic outlook and political undertones. Whereas in his second film for Fox, the musical comedy ADORABLE, he’s back to doing what he can with the creakiest of material — but his newfound autonomy ignites his creativity. As rebellious princess Janet Gaynor and palace guard Henri Garat meet incognito and try to navigate affairs of the heart and marriages of state, Dieterle embellishes the narrative with time compressions and spatial anomalies — including unending hallways that defy the laws of physics — that call to mind Rouben Mamoulian’s work on Love Me Tonight a year earlier. Adorable may be the ’30s film musical that soars the highest above an almost insistently undistinguished score (the title tune sounds like a tepid knockoff of the Gershwins’ “Delishious,” which wasn’t so hot to begin with) — and it’s Dieterle who does most of the soaring. Working in tandem with cinematographer John F. Seitz (as he had on 6 Hours to Live), he indulges in steady feats of showmanship: most memorably, after Gaynor enjoys a night of revelry, letting her shoes go on dancing long after she’s discarded them and climbed into bed, and allowing the bed itself to rock her to sleep. (Did Mamoulian — in a bit of directorial quid pro quo — use Dieterle’s rocking bed as inspiration for his magical rocking chairs in Porgy and Bess two years later?) He sets the viewer down in an enchanted kingdom and sees to it that the enchantment rarely wanes.
And THE DEVIL’S IN LOVE, the best of Dieterle’s three Fox films, is the sort of romantic melodrama he would excel at in the 1940’s. It’s a work of feverish beauty. Despite its initial setting at a French Legion fort in Northern Africa, it’s not a war movie; instead, it’s an early example of a “man on the run.” It concerns an honorable doctor — set up for murder and forced to flee his military post — who takes refuge at a mission in a small port town. As Dr. Andre Morand, Victor Jory is top-billed for the first time, during that brief period where he was seen and used as a leading man. His swagger and fervor are tailor-made for the role; you believe he’s the sort of committed surgeon who’d butt heads with a corrupt superior officer, and you understand why his sense of moral righteousness doesn’t play well in a courtroom setting. And when he begins caring for the less fortunate at the mission, and a previously unseen warmth and sense of humor emerge, you realize how much army politics have interfered with his love of medicine. Howard Estabrook — who’d taken home an Oscar for 1931’s Cimarron — did the script, envisioning a symmetrical plot bookended by battles. The motivations are clear and the characterizations crisp, and he’s a smart enough writer to put the viewer to work intuiting elements left unexpressed. (You sense the fort will fall apart without a doctor of Andre’s outrage and devotion — so when it does, you’re unsurprised.)
But the film’s secret weapon is cinematographer Hal Mohr, in his first assignment with Dieterle. (Their next joint project would be A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1935.) Both of them had roots in the German Expressionist movement of the ’20s; in fact, both had made movies with one of its key figures, director Paul Leni: Dieterle in a leading role in Leni’s best-known German film, Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks, 1924) and Mohr as cinematographer on his final outing, The Last Warning, Universal’s follow-up to his better-remembered The Cat and the Canary. They saw the film as an opportunity to incorporate elements of German Expressionist cinema — their own variation, as it were (much as Josef von Sternberg and Lee Garmes had done over at Paramount). In the early scenes at Fort Rondet, they revel in the high contrast between dark and light so common to the movement, repeatedly changing the shape of the frame by flooding portions with light while leaving others black. They go for bold dramatic effects that magnify the characters’ sense of unease and unrest. And the trial sequence that follows is a model of furioso camerawork — all of it emphasizing how swiftly the wheels of injustice turn. Harshly lit close-ups snap back to over-the-shoulder shots — then are wiped away. (We’re given no establishing shot, mirroring Andre’s disorientation.) While Andre is being grilled by the prosecutor, Dieterle inserts a shot of a triple-chinned tribunal member fanning himself impatiently, foreshadowing the verdict; when Andre rises to plead his case, shadows of sentries parade behind him. He’s convicted and incarcerated even before all the evidence is in.
The look of the film shifts after Andre escapes his imprisonment and makes his way to the town of Port Zamba. Dieterle and Mohr delve further into the delicate interplay of light and dark, accentuating the agony of a fugitive uncertain where to turn or whom to trust. As Andre surveys his new home, faces are forever obscured in shadow; even in the relative quietude of the mission, trellises and trees cast shifting patterns, disguising and confounding features. (When the cops start to close in, Dieterle floods the mission with such harsh front-lighting that it becomes a hotbed of danger and intrigue. Fire up a lamp and there’s no knowing who might be seated beside you, or lying in wait.) Only Margot (Loretta Young), who works alongside him, provides the sense of clarity Andre craves; around her, the world seems once again uncomplicated. Yet that presents its own dangers. When the pair sit listening to the music of a nearby caravan, Andre grows so intoxicated, he’s tempted to reveal details of his past that must remain hidden. (The woman he craves poses perhaps the greatest threat to his safety.)
Young is quietly subversive, as she was in so many pre-Code films. Although her features are idealized — the moon seems to be forever highlighting her hair, even when she’s indoors, and the moment she steps outside, the breeze catches her dress, as if the smallest gust could lift her aloft — she’s no innocent. When she realizes she’s falling for Andre, she waits till she’s secured a kiss before admitting she has a fiancé — and within half a day, she’s ready to give her fiancé the boot. And when she realizes Andre isn’t as angelic as he appears to be, she’s undeterred. Although we hear only bits and pieces about the weeks between Andre’s escape from prison and his setting up practice in Port Zamba, it’s clear he didn’t live like a monk. He spent much of it in the company of Rena (Vivienne Osborne), a madam who runs a nightclub. When Rena tracks him down at the mission and stakes her claim, Margot is unfazed. She’s long suspected this handsome doctor had a mysterious past, and now it’s confirmed; his darker side makes him all the more appealing. Although Estabrook could have positioned Margot and Rena as rivals — the good woman and the wicked one, battling it out for Andre’s affections — he refuses to stoop to cliché. When Margot discovers her fiancé is ill and finds herself helpless to book passage to him, it’s Rena — decisive and proactive — who comes to her aid; she ensures that Andre and Margot have the means to escape, and that the authorities are distracted while they do so. All the characters are nicely shaded. C. Henry Gordon, as the chief of police, is hunting after Andre not because of any thirst for justice, but for the reward money — and although he comes close to catching his prey, he succumbs to Rena’s charms. And as Andre’s assistant, Herbert Mundin is a scoundrel and a grifter, but a likable lug just the same: a friend to everyone, even after he fleeces them.
Near the end, in a feat of genius without precedent or parallel, the very look of the film becomes the means by which the incarcerated hero finds justice. When fate leads Andre back to the fort from which he fled, he sees an opportunity to clear his name. The identity of the real killer has been obvious to us all along (or rather, as Estabrook scripts it, we’ve seen him as a likely suspect, so we’re unsurprised when Andre fingers him). Andre spots him hospitalized and bedridden and knows it’s his chance to act. He lies about the severity of the patient’s condition — panicking him with the prognosis that he has 30 minutes to live. Wheeling his gurney into a pitch-black room, he uses a flashlight to illuminate key objects from the original murder site — then, looming over the suspect, blinds him with light, suggesting he clear his conscience before meeting his maker. He essentially stages a charade in the German Expressionist style, adopting Dieterle’s tools as his own, in a nightmarish scene that’s as close to pure horror as the film gets. (The wonder is that Dieterle then tops that scene with a climactic battle worthy of Sergei Eisenstein.) The Devil’s in Love may lack the thematic ambitions that set The Last Flight aloft, but it’s nonetheless Dieterle’s most accomplished sound film to date.
Although his trio of Fox films were triumphs, Dieterle mostly spent 1933 and 1934 plying his trade at Warner Bros. — and to diminishing returns. (The studio saddled him with worse scripts in 1934 than they had in 1932.) There were a few exceptions. GRAND SLAM — one of Dieterle’s least-remembered films — is about contract bridge (which was at the time consuming couples across the country), and everything about it seems both accurate and oversized. It’s a spoof of marriage, of unhealthy obsessions, of the mainstream media, of the vagaries of fame — and of sportscasting, of all things. It fixes a handful of satirical targets, and manages to hit them all — but it never suffers from that frantic feel emblematic of the Warner Bros. factory at its worst. The opening scene — set at an upscale Russian restaurant in New York City — introduces the cast of characters in short, clever strokes, using fluid camera movement and sumptuous design to disguise the apparatus beneath; we waft from wealthy patrons engaging in chitchat to the wait staff (Paul Lukas among them) amusing themselves in the kitchen to Loretta Young eking out a living in the coatcheck room. In Dieterle’s by-now signature style, he keeps our eyes busy while our ears are taking in the necessities. (The next time exposition needs to be doled out, he plants us atop a double-decker bus.)
Lukas is Peter Stanislavsky, a wannabe novelist; Young is his pert fiancée Marcia. Peter knows nothing about bridge (which in 1933 is unacceptable); in fact, he finds the game preposterous. Marcia sets out to instruct him, but Peter proves a resistant pupil, leading off every round with a maximum bid of seven spades. But at a private bridge party at the restaurant, wealthy matron Helen Vinson insists he join them, to fill out a table, and when he opens with his customary bid and makes it, his strategy — which he dubs, with dismissiveness towards his patrons and their passion, the Stanislavsky System — fascinates the crowd. And quickly becomes a sensation. There are no rules to the Stanislavsky System — that’s the point; if there are no rules, then husbands and wives can’t fight with each other over improper bidding or play. Needless to say, such a revolutionary concept sweeps the nation. (A headline informs us that “the church is endorsing the Stanislavsky System of bridge because it upholds the sanctity of marriage.”) The script by Erwin Gelsey and David Boehm is a tidy one, understanding the rules of the game, and how to make comic use of terms like “vulnerable” and “dummy.” But it’s Dieterle who holds it all together, balancing the effete posturing of the more upscale players with the broad physical routines supplied by Marcia’s neighbors. (One is an acrobat who can only focus — and release tension — if he does flips between hands.)
Lukas and Young — an unlikely pairing — make a believably flawed couple. He’s condescending, she’s ambitious and manipulative. But they’re lovely. You see all the qualities that attract them to each other, and when they’re putting on an act as the country’s happiest couple, it doesn’t seem like an act at all. But over time, they fall prey to their own con; even in a game without rules, players want to win. Couples still seek validation from their spouses — and like other bridge champions, Lukas and Young start to wither under the spotlight. The film culminates in a match between Stanislavsky and discredited bridge expert Cedric Van Dorn, and Dieterle pulls out all the stops. In the grand hotel where the tournament is taking place — the bridge table roped off like a prizefighting ring — socialites congregate on one side while an orchestra entertains on the other. And in the forefront, a commentator perches behind a booth, offering a play-by-play that’s highly subjective and frequently inaccurate. (The satire of attention-grabbing media is uncanny: they can’t just tell the story; they have to be the story.) As crowds gather outside the hotel, eying the bridge scores posted on the facade, the rest of the country is glued to their radios — and each bid or play is punctuated by shots of avid listeners: from school children to prostitutes, in restaurants and in laundromats. The whole world stops for this climactic match — literally stops. Grand Slam may never again register with the forcefulness it had in 1933, but for those of us who were indoctrinated into the world of bridge from the moment we were big enough to hold a hand of cards, the film is a diamond in the ruff.
FROM HEADQUARTERS (1933) is Dieterle’s best work in the “fast and tough” Warner Bros. style. It’s a murder mystery set and solved entirely at a police station, the perpetrator fingered through a combination of state-of-the-art forensic evidence, solid detective work, and the sharp eye of lieutenant George Brent. Dieterle never lets the science get too dry nor the outbursts from witnesses and suspects grow too outrageous. There’s a fun fakeout with a photograph that you think is the crime scene, and another with an ominous shadow that turns out to be Hugh Herbert, just about the least ominous man in show business. Dieterle engages in frequent crosscutting between the police investigators and the medical examiner; at times, he seems to be challenging the cameraman to keep up. (The ME who takes too much delight in carving up dead bodies — Edward Ellis — would be immortalized onscreen the following year as The Thin Man.) It’s the kind of film that every Warners director would’ve done well, but differently; Dieterle’s is a doozy. Whereas FOG OVER FRISCO is the standard murder mystery-cum-romp that every top Warners director would’ve done in pretty much the same way. It’s the kind of film where you’re supposed to be more impressed by how much plot is crammed into an hour than by the plot itself, and the sort where everything gets wiped off the screen so quickly that nothing stays with you. Dieterle’s work is full of nervy brilliance, but you’d be hard-pressed to make the case that it’s the best use of his time and talent. And THE FIREBIRD is yet another murder mystery — this one of the apartment-building variety, albeit with too few suspects. (We only get to know one set of tenants well.) Dieterle keeps it moving; there’s just no suspense — and no spark.
MADAME DU BARRY should have been a highlight of Dieterle’s Hollywood years. A lively, salty and handsomely appointed period piece, it boasts a bravura cast headed by Dolores del Río and Reginald Owen. Few leading ladies of the time could have done justice to the character described here as “a duchess in the morning, a milkmaid at noon, a strumpet at night.” Del Río could — and did. But the film had the misfortune to be released shortly after the adoption of the Production Code, and the Hays Office took a hatchet to it. (The story of a woman who faced the guillotine was itself carved up like a Christmas goose.) The middle third — which charts Du Barry’s thwarted attempt to be presented at court, and her retaliatory seduction of the Prime Minister — reeks of lines and scenes gone missing; the payoffs and paybacks don’t quite deliver. So much of del Río was relegated to the cutting room floor, in fact, the final reel is dominated by the sexual awakening of Louis XV’s oafish heir — and it’s a comedown. Yet even with some of its sparkle, clarity and ambition stripped away, Madame Du Barry remains — if not the rare jewel that was intended — a shiny bauble, and its easy blend of majesty and mischief continues to impress. (For another truncated triumph, see Magic Fire, two decades later.) FASHIONS OF 1934 starts with some lively banter between William Powell and Bette Davis, both their characters hungry enough to be heartless. (He’s a flimflam man who runs through rackets as quickly as he runs through women; she’s a clothes designer who — down on her luck — becomes his latest accessory.) But once the pair wow Paris with a Busby Berkeley salute to the ostrich feather, the requisite romantic wrap-up grows a little moldy. And THE SECRET BRIDE — a political thriller in which Barbara Stanwyck is dolled up like Kay Francis and wasted — is the worst of the bunch. The trailer promises Stanwyck “in the kind of dramatic role that made her famous, playing a man’s game with the heart of a woman” — but none of that’s on the screen; her character is so incidental to the action, she’s not even present when the killer is fingered. It’s Dieterle’s final film of 1934: taut and well-shot, yet an ominous sign of things to come. Once Warners saw he could bring in their B movies with style and efficiency, they felt no need to promote him to better material.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM arrived in 1935 to jumpstart Dieterle’s stalling career at Warner Bros. To understand it fully, we have to look past presumptions that have been made and perpetuated over time. Max Reinhardt was an Austrian stage director of international acclaim when he came to the States in 1934 to present a now-legendary production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl. Warners producer Hal Wallis and Dieterle (who had been an actor in Reinhardt’s company in Berlin) convinced Jack Warner to film a version of Shakespeare’s classic with Reinhardt at the helm. (The studio hoped such a prestigious picture would enhance their reputation.) Because Reinhardt hadn’t been behind the camera in over 20 years (and those efforts had proven disastrous) — and spoke no English to boot — Dieterle offered to facilitate, and the two agreed to share the chores: Reinhardt would oversee the production and coach the actors, and Dieterle would film the scenes. (In Reinhardt’s contract, Dieterle was specified as his “assistant director.”) That’s what was intended, and scores of film historians for nearly a century — guided by the pair’s eventual onscreen credit, which listed them as co-directors — have presumed that’s what happened.
Except it didn’t. In 1998, Mickey Rooney — who played Puck at the Bowl, and who was borrowed from MGM to reprise his performance onscreen — was asked what it was like to have to answer to two directors. He gave a quizzical look, as if the question made no sense, and responded, “I only had one director: Mr. Dieterle." For numerous reasons — Reinhardt’s inability to understand screen acting; his ignorance of current film-craft; nine days of shooting he missed because of a breach-of-contract suit filed against him by a French film company; plus a willful, inflexible and vindictive attitude that prompted studio publicity head Eddie Selzer to declare him “a madman” — Dieterle took over. Reinhardt coached the actors during rehearsals, as he intended, but the vast majority chose to ignore him; according to Jimmy Cagney (whose performance as Bottom has come to be seen as one of the film’s masterstrokes), Reinhardt was so unaware of how to play to the camera, he instructed the cast to perform at the top of their lungs, gesticulating wildly. (They sat during rehearsals rolling their eyes, whispering, “Someone ought to tell him.”) Warners realized that only Dieterle could pull off the picture, and reduced Reinhardt to a figurehead. He became an inconvenience that had to be tolerated, and Reinhardt — realizing that Warners wanted him for his name and not his input — found creative ways of sticking it to the studio. He would hold up shooting by demanding the buttons on a costume be resewn or a prop be rebuilt to his liking — details he knew full well the camera would never pick up. And yet for all the studio’s efforts to marginalize Reinhardt during filming, they still saw his renown as their ticket to respectability; in fact, a week before the premiere, the studio ran ads in the trades giving Reinhardt sole directorial credit, although the industry knew full well that Dieterle had helmed the film. It was only after Dieterle took his anger to the press that the studio restored his name — and even then, the best they’d offer him was a co-director credit, relegated to second position. In their quest to be seen as cultured, Warners was cutthroat.
As director, Dieterle was charged with bringing both artistry and practicality to the proceedings; even with the anxious eyes of the studio upon him, he was more than up to the task. It didn’t matter that — in order to bring down the film to a manageable running time — the screenwriters had truncated much of Shakespeare’s poetry. It made little difference that — because Warners insisted the film be cast mostly from its own roster, with stars where possible — a handful of leads were ill-suited to their roles. Dieterle could convey in silence what was left unsaid — or unsold — in speech. The first 15 minutes are a bit haphazard. But once we enter Shakespeare’s seductive, chaotic forest — where real and fairy worlds collide, and magic and romance reign — Dieterle seems fully in command, like Oberon seated upon his steed. Cinematographer Hal Mohr — with whom Dieterle had found such common ground on The Devil’s in Love — gives the forest the spacious yet eerie glow of a fairy tale by spraying the trees with orange aluminum paint and coating them with reflective metal particles. (He became the first — and only — write-in winner of an Academy Award.) Dieterle takes Mohr’s inspirations and runs with them. He racks up so many variations — in terms of backdrop, filter, angle and composition — that you grow a bit giddy wondering what’s to come: whether the next shot will deposit you by a brook or in a glade, whether it will be captured through fog or through cobwebs. Will it be shot low to the ground, the tall grass slicing the screen, or shot high from the treetops, two curious crows to the fore? The special effects are undeniably impressive, but Dieterle creates an enchanted atmosphere simply through the way he varies the shots — always with an internal logic you intuitively understand. Near the end, when Oberon orders his underlings to disperse, Dieterle indulges in one of his best-remembered conjuring tricks. Oberon holds up his diaphanous cape, which the wind lifts and unfurls, and as he rides off, the cape — seemingly growing longer than we’d imagined — continues to blanket the frame, providing a backdrop for all the creatures racing to follow him. Dieterle holds the camera still, but creates the illusion that he’s panning the forest. The shot dazzles on first watch, but it takes two or three viewings to fully appreciate the artistry behind it.
Dieterle had to be problem-solver as well as visionary. Reinhardt had summoned choreographer Bronislava Nijinska from Paris to stage a series of ballets for the film, even though the powers-that-be at Warner Bros. insisted they had no interest in seeing ballet on the screen. (They told Nijinska as much at their first meeting.) So what was Dieterle to do with Nijinska and her corps of dancers, not to mention the two spots in the script — the awakening of the forest creatures, and their return to slumber — that called for choreography? Dieterle ended up plotting the sequences himself — point by point, shot by shot — and employing the dancers impressionistically. He uses the fairies to convey urgency and pageantry — and to defy the laws of gravity. There’s very little choreography left — they scurry and they soar much more than they dance, and they service the plot: anticipating the arrival of Titania, ferrying the changeling boy to her and heightening her taunting of Oberon. You rarely follow their feet, or study their steps, but Dieterle is careful never to reduce them to Busby Berkeley formations. And in the Nocturne that concludes the forest sequence, Dieterle relaxes the pace enough to allow for a few minutes of formal ballet. (He no doubt sensed that by that point the Warners brass wouldn’t mind.) Yet even there, Dieterle adds a cinematic twist. As Oberon’s attendants corral the fairies, only ballerina Nini Theilade proves resistant, prompting one of the servants to lift her onto his shoulder, her hands fluttering above her. As Nijinska stages the pas de deux, he merely walks her upstage, but as Dieterle reimagines it (irising out on Theilade’s hands, then layering the image onto a celestial matte painting), it looks like she’s rising into — and being swallowed by — the starry night.
One of Dieterle’s greatest feats of wizardry goes unnoticed — but by design. After three weeks of shooting, Mickey Rooney took a brief trip to Big Bear, where he broke his leg tobogganing. According to Rooney, Jack Warner — aware that Puck’s ubiquitousness meant production might have to shut down — didn’t just react badly; he threatened to kill him. (“Then after I kill him, I'm going to break his other leg.”) Dieterle didn’t miss a beat; within 24 hours, he had hired a stand in — up-and-coming teen actor George P. Breakston (Great Expectations, The Dark Angel), who had been Rooney’s alternate at the Bowl — and within a day, Breakston was on the set, with Dieterle working every angle to make full use of his form without exposing his face. And Dieterle’s ingenuity only increased when Rooney — his upper torso available again for filming — returned to the set a month later and joined Breakston. Watching the completed film, you’d never suspect the seamless sleights of hand, including numerous shots of Puck (contentedly perched on a tree branch) composed of Rooney’s upper half, Breakston’s lower, and foliage to disguise the join in the middle. In his seminal 2009 essay “Midsummer Dream, Midwinter Nightmare,” Scott MacQueen enthuses, “Perhaps the cleverest example of Dieterle's resourcefulness is a continuous take that has ‘Breakston-Puck’ race into frame, making hand gestures to Olivia de Havilland to follow him. After ‘Breakston-Puck’ has left frame, the camera pans with de Havilland to reveal ‘Rooney-Puck’ already planted in the glade, repeating the same hand gestures to her. The audience's attention is so well directed that the substitution of players is never apparent.” Dieterle not only generated scenes around Rooney’s restrictions, but through them. Puck holding firm to Helena's skirt as she drags him through the forest — his additional weight forcing her to fall into a deep slumber — is one of the movie’s best-remembered block-comedy bits. It’s achieved with Rooney atop an unseen rollerboard, and it was devised purely to bypass his immobility.
Although studio directors at the time were rarely allowed to supervise the final cut of their films, Warner and Wallis let Dieterle (and editor Ralph Dawson, the film’s other Oscar winner) do so on Midsummer. The film was too obviously an expression of his aesthetic for anyone else to properly assemble. Dieterle, who remained Reinhardt’s staunchest supporter till his dying day, once admitted that although Reinhardt’s Hollywood Bowl production was unforgettable, “Shakespeare died somewhere along the way.” The film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream brings back The Bard. When Dieterle is working with a consistently strong team of actors — Rooney, Cagney, Victor Jory (Oberon), Anita Louise (Titania), Joe E. Brown (Flute) — the scene work is impressive, as in the passages corresponding to the play’s Act 3, Scene 1, detailing the rustic band of actors’ first rehearsal in the forest, and Puck and Oberon’s enchantment of Bottom and Titania, respectively. Where performers are weaker, Dieterle graces them with bits that endear them to the audience: Dick Powell (Lysander) flipping off his rival with a whistle and a flick of his cape; Jean Muir (Helena) taking time away from her ritualistic self-pity for a brief encounter with a bear. Quite a few critics chastised the film for the liberties it took, but in The New York Times, Andre Sennwald — praising Dieterle as “one of the most skillful directors in Hollywood” — captured the qualities that have made it endure: “It is a brave, beautiful and interesting effort to subdue the most difficult of Shakespeare's works, and it has magical moments when it comes all alive with what you feel when you read the play. The work is rich in aspiration and the sum of its faults is dwarfed against the sheer bulk of the enterprise.” And then, in a fashion suitable to the chaos that had characterized A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Sennwald retracted his review three days later and panned the film. But he had it right the first time. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been filmed seven times since 1935, many with better actors and better adaptations — but it’s the 1935 version that audiences continue to talk about. It’s that forest that remains a pre-CGI marvel. During a particularly frustrating time in the shooting schedule, Jack Warner fired off a memo complaining that “all Dieterle is worrying about is composition.” Warner wanted big close-ups of the actors, especially on the laugh lines. But Dieterle understood that when it came to filming a forest that had been firing the imaginations of theatregoers for over 400 years, composition was key. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of several Dieterle films that’s grown in stature and acclaim since its original release, and rightly so.
Despite its sizable investment in the film, Warners turned a profit and secured the desired Oscar nominations (including Best Picture) to boost their standing. That said, audiences would have to wait six years to see Dieterle apply his magic to a fantasy over which he had full artistic control — but in the meantime, the film showed the studio what he was capable of. At Jack Warner’s instructions, Dieterle began preproduction on the studio’s next prestige pic, Anthony Adverse — then suddenly found it reassigned it to Mervyn LeRoy as a wedding gift. (LeRoy had recently married Harry’s eldest daughter, Doris.) And Dieterle was handed something distinctly inferior. (This was not an uncommon practice. As Dieterle later recalled, “At Warners the moment you had a success, they gave you something terrible to keep you from getting a swelled head. They would force you to do a lousy story as a routine method of keeping you in line.”) But that lousy story — DR. SOCRATES with Paul Muni (filmed with efficiency by Dieterle, but second-rate nonetheless) — changed the trajectory of his career, when he showed Muni the outline of a script in development about Louis Pasteur, then he and Muni told Warners they’d make Dr. Socrates if they could follow it up with the Pasteur project.
The resulting film, The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), proved such a resounding success (taking home Oscars for Best Actor, Best Story, and Best Screenplay — plus a nod for Best Picture — and further cementing Warners’ status) that Dieterle was handed five more high-profile biopics over the next four years. And through these films — many of them major hits — he established himself, as Flinn puts it, as “the quintessential ‘liberal’ director of the ’30s: his films championed the liberal, democratic, enlightened tradition.” The underlying theme of the Warners bios — life’s inexorable march towards progress (and not just on the scientific front, but in the fight for freedom, fairness and equality) — has grown tame; it’s a message we’ve gotten used to hearing. (Perhaps, too, it seems a bit tonedeaf today.) But at the time, the Warners biopics were as invigorating as the screwballs; they reassured Depression-era audiences that whatever adversities they faced, there were individuals of intellect and influence determined to better their lives.
Forsaking chronology, I’m going to make my way through Dieterle’s biopics in short(er) strokes. They all have their good points, yet they don’t hold up as well as the best of his ’30s programmers or his ’40s melodramas. Although they reveal a lot about Dieterle’s personal convictions — and have to be considered among the strongest reasons he was gray listed in the ’50s — they don’t reveal as much about him as an artist. But at the time, he was considered a director at the top of his game, at the top of his field. (Reviewing Louis Pasteur, The New York Times’ film critic Frank Nugent hailed Dieterle’s “gifted direction”; he dubbed his work on The Life of Emile Zola “majestic” and his work on Dr. Erhlich’s Magic Bullet “faultless.”)
The writers assigned to THE STORY OF LOUIS PASTEUR, Sheridan Gibney and Pierre Collings, had no template to follow in developing their screenplay. There had been no film biographies about medical innovation — would audiences take to it? (Jack Warner certainly didn’t think so. He objected from the start — “We don’t want to do a period piece, and we don’t want to hide Paul behind a beard” — and even after he agreed to fund the film, he gave it the lowest budget possible for an A picture.) So Gibney and Collings hedged their bets, tossing in fictional elements that were surefire crowd-pleasers: a romance between Pasteur’s daughter and the young doctor who comes to work for him; a long-standing rivalry between Pasteur and his chief detractor, one Dr. Charbonnet of the French Academy, which inspires some of the film’s more dramatic set-pieces. (The two even engage in the requisite sentimental stalemate near the end, when one has to deliver the other’s first grandchild.) To the writers’ credit, Pasteur is well characterized. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly — but my, he does suffer a lot of them along the way. Although his contention that microbes cause disease was a novel one in the mid-19th century, the screenwriters never explain why the medical community finds him so threatening that they grow insistent not only on stopping his work, but on taking him down. The lengths Charbonnet goes to expose Pasteur as a fraud — long after Pasteur has proven the efficacy of his methods — keep the stakes high, but strain credibility. (Even Napoleon III — whose own wife has praised Pasteur’s findings — sees fit to banish him from Paris. Characters turn on Pasteur for no good reason.) And that said, Muni is so appealing — a well-meaning curmudgeon, cursed with being right about pretty much everything — and Dieterle is so adept at interweaving the stylistic strands — from life-and-death procedures to lovers’ tiffs to a country carnival, complete with acrobats — that the film entertains even at its most seemingly arbitrary and irritating.
Hal Wallis, who called Dieterle “one of my favorite directors ….. a perfectionist [with] a great sense of lighting, composition and mood,“ thought him “the perfect choice to direct Pasteur.” And indeed he was; as film historian Richard Koszarski notes, “The best of [Dieterle’s biopics] have a distinct visual grace and a sophistication of performance, especially from the supporting players, that could not have been expected from one of the studio's less stylish directors. Compare Pasteur and Zola with Mervyn LeRoy's Anthony Adverse, for example.” But the biopics also limited Dieterle; because Warners didn’t want their eponymous heroes analyzed, merely aggrandized, Dieterle’s uncommon ability to accentuate his characters’ pricklier qualities — without rendering them unsympathetic — went largely untapped. He was expected to place his subjects on a pedestal, whereas his true talents lay in easing them off it.
But by the time Warners greenlit its next biopic about scientific progress — DR. EHRLICH’S MAGIC BULLET, four years later — the studio had come to realize they didn’t need to coddle their audience. Romantic subplots were expendable; the creation of an arch-nemesis was unnecessary. The challenges inherent in scientific advancement were enough. And the new assurance led to a tonal change, one that suited Dieterle well. Whereas Pasteur is infused with hope, Dr. Ehrlich — a vehicle for Edward G. Robinson — is tinged with irony. At the start of Pasteur, patients are dying, and only Pasteur understands why; at the top of Dr. Ehrlich, a patient is assured a treatment for syphilis will cure him, even though the attending physician knows full well that it won’t. And the attending physician is Dr. Paul Ehrlich himself. He’s part of an establishment given to lying about its limitations. Pasteur sets its lead character, a chemist, apart from the medical community: the white knight who swoops in and saves the day. Ehrlich is no superhero; he’s susceptible to the same diseases and disillusions that plague his patients, and over time, they prove his undoing. Oh, the film tugs at a lot of the same heartstrings as its predecessor. Pasteur saves a boy sick with rabies; Ehrlich heals a whole hospital of children stricken with diphtheria. But in a key scene, Dieterle provides some much-needed balance: allowing us to see the cures through the eyes of the patients. Instead of providing yet another opportunity to glorify the good doctor, it emphasizes the plight of people begging for the next scientific innovation. There are contrivances that the film is too good for, as when Ehrlich’s wife turns up the heat in his lab and — eureka! — ignites a breakthrough in his research. But mostly, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet is content to put the science first, wondering: when is the right time to make a vaccine available? How many clinical trials should be done while people are dying? It’s not just about the joy of saving lives, but about the risks of saving them; as such, it invites the sort of emotional engagement at which Dieterle excelled. (The script by Norman Burnstine and Heinz Herald — with rewrites by John Huston — went on to be Oscar nominated.) It’s one of his two best bios.
The film that followed Ehrlich, A DISPATCH FROM REUTERS (also with Robinson), is another biopic about an idealistic rebel taking on the establishment — here, Julius Reuter, whose efforts to speedily transmit information led to the creation of an international news service; it’s also, like Ehrlich, about the challenges of funding innovation. But the subject matter lifts it out of the laboratory and sets it in the sun, and Dieterle and cinematographer James Wong Howe take full advantage, letting the film soar in a way that the others don’t. One of the first set-pieces is a race against time to save a child: a stagecoach has been dispatched to a hospital carrying improper medication, a rider on horseback is sent to stop the stagecoach, and Reuter releases a carrier pigeon to outrun the rider. It sets the tone for a story that — like the pioneer at its heart — refuses to come up for air. Eddie Albert is a drag as Reuter’s lazy friend and assistant, but Robinson’s Reuter is canny and cunning and relentless. Reuters is scrappier than the other bios, but it’s also brasher and livelier; it’s a fine trade-off. It’s sometimes overlooked in a discussion of Dieterle biopics — but not nearly as much as THE WHITE ANGEL, a Kay Francis starrer about Florence Nightingale that flopped in 1936 and was promptly forgotten. Critics and audiences couldn’t understand how an actress who had carved a career out of playing a clothes horse could expect to be taken seriously as such a plain, austere woman. Her reputation defeated her. Ironically, the fact that Francis’s name has faded into obscurity works to the film’s advantage; now that we don’t bring preconceptions to the screen, we can see what a wonderful vehicle for her it is: one she tackles with commitment and vigor. It’s a transformation not unlike the ones Muni underwent in Louis Pasteur and Robinson in Dr. Ehrlich. Audiences applauded them for their boldness and versatility, while Francis was crucified for daring to do something different — for stepping out of line, as it were.
Francis is surrounded by a fine supporting cast: Ian Hunter as the reporter who understands Nightingale’s work and Donald Woods as the suitor who doesn’t; Henry O’Neill as the doctor desperate to support her and Donald Crisp as the one determined to take her down. The film isn’t subtle about the challenges Nightingale faced, but misogyny isn’t subtle. (Witness the way the movie was received.) There are a few underwritten scenes, and some transitions that are plain awful. (There are way too many intertitles, for one thing.) But most of what’s there is highly watchable. When Nightingale arrives in Scutari to assume her post at a military hospital and sees the degradation and neglect that the soldiers have been forced to endure, Francis bites down hard on her lip, her horror turning to anger and resolve. And Dieterle sits on that shot for a full 15 seconds. She knows just what to do with it, and he knows enough to let her. (Nightingale doesn’t bite her lip all that often; she’s unable to suppress the occasional dig at her chauvinistic superior officer, even though she knows it’s not to her advantage.) Yet there are times when the nobility of Nightingale’s mission (and her doggedness in pursuing it) transcends the squalor of the setting. When Nightingale makes her way through the darkened wards at night — quietly checking on each patient, illuminated only by a lantern — and a bandaged man whose eyes are barely visible salutes her in gratitude, Dieterle taps into a warmth and humanity that elude his drier biopics. At moments like this, Francis truly becomes the angel we dream of having by our side, when our bodies and souls are in need of healing.
Sometimes Hollywood gets it wrong when it comes to history (e.g., The White Angel, which — even as you enjoy it — you recognize as largely a work of fiction); sometimes history gets it wrong when it comes to Hollywood. History has proclaimed 1939’s JUAREZ a misfire; in truth, it’s the best of Dieterle’s biopics. It presents a more multi-layered look at “progress” than Pasteur or Ehrlich, and a far more ambivalent portrait of its title character. It’s the biopic for those who weren’t crazy about Pasteur and Zola; since critics had showered praise on those (fairly shallow) films, it stands to reason they viewed Juarez as a failure.
Juarez — which charts the struggle for the soul of the Mexican people between rebel leader Benito Juarez and newly-installed Emperor Maximilian von Habsburg — doesn’t just deconstruct the Warners biopic formula. It blows it to bits. Dieterle stubbornly refuses to streamline its story into a tale of good vs. evil; although there are two warring factions, he declines to imbue one with a clearer sense of virtue. Screenwriters John Huston, Æneas MacKenzie and Wolfgang Reinhardt imagine political protagonists who badly misread each other’s motivations. Juarez presumes Maximilian has come to “rule over us as a tyrant”; Maximilian’s military advisers convince him that Juarez is a “wild beast in the jungle.” Neither statement is true. But Juarez can’t let go of his preconceptions; when Maximilian makes a conciliatory proposal that speaks to his desire “to protect the interests of a great majority of our subjects,” Juarez sees it as a political tactic concocted by a wily opponent: “Virtue is a formidable weapon in the hands of an enemy.” The more Maximilian proceeds in good faith, the more Juarez acts like the savage Maximilian’s advisors warned him of. The movie shows Juarez misusing his power out of vanity and greed, and relishing his plans of attack in a way Maximilian never does. It’s a battle between a conqueror and a statesman — but which is which?
Dieterle ensures that both Brian Aherne and Paul Muni — who never share a scene onscreen — pitch their roles perfectly. Aherne — in a performance that speaks to the Hollywood career he should have had, had he not had a gift for self-sabotage — makes Maximilian proud but kind, soft-spoken and trusting, magnanimous yet misguided. And Dieterle uses Aherne’s height to good advantage: he towers over his advisors, his generals and even his wife — but he never seems intimidating; instead, he seems imbued with a sort of paternal benevolence. Aherne leans so heavily into Maximilian’s humble yet noble bearing that he fully convinces you the man would sacrifice his authority to serve his people, and sacrifice his life to save his soldiers. He’s almost too perfect: a ready-made martyr. At times, Maximilian is so adaptable and Juarez (by comparison) so unyielding that it’s difficult to say which of them wields the moral compass. (It’s possible to believe the peasants who support Juarez are being duped by a power-hungry narcissist.) Muni plays Juarez as more stubborn than single-minded, more manipulative than inspiring. He doesn’t try to paint a saintly portrait; he paints a credible and useful one. Muni’s performance is at once ostentatious and self-effacing; it’s wildly underrated. He gives himself over to the role — both in makeup and manner — till he’s all but unrecognizable. But he doesn’t try to play the hero. John Huston complained that Muni added dialogue during filming to augment his role. (Bette Davis, who played the Empress Carlota, later claimed it was a full 80 pages. And I’m the Queen of England.) But the proportions as they stand now are perfect. With any less camera time, there would be too little Juarez, and the essential conflict between two self-respecting men — each of them satisfied that their political ideology best serves the people — would never ignite.
Juarez represents the full flowering of Dieterle’s talents. Through the course of the ’30s, Dieterle’s effects became both more subtle and more pronounced. Early inspirations — like the placement of Kay Francis among her statues, their complementary curves highlighting her self-absorption, or the use of panes of glass to separate Ruth Chatterton from her suitor, underscoring their incompatibility — became second-nature to him, and multiplied. By the end of the decade, you marvel at the creativity of his compositions — the way the actors, the props and the backdrops achieve harmony and balance: each positioned on the screen with a graceful inevitability — but the arrangement of visual elements is massaged so carefully, it never distracts from the story-telling. On the contrary, the compositions grow so understated that you’re unaware of their emotional resonance until the second or third go-round. Profiled in the earliest film fanzine, Motion Picture, in December of 1937, Dieterle was extolled as a study in contrasts: “He not only owns one of the finest libraries of classical and contemporary literature, chiefly American, German, French, English and Chinese, and is an authority — yet he finds time also to exercise daily like a college athlete. He swims each day, summer and winter; hikes over the trails of the Hollywood foothills — and plays a blistering game of badminton.” Yet the most fascinating contradiction is that this formidable figure — “six-feet-four-inches tall, of athletic physique, his appearance … a singularly dominating figure of a man” — specialized in a sort of grace, restraint and visual poetry that belied his imposing presence. And that the elegance of his compositions was only enhanced by the dynamism of his camerawork.
The character of Maximilian von Hapsburg plays to all of Dieterle’s strengths. As scripted, Juarez is a film about delusion. As Dieterle shoots it, it’s a film about the romance of delusion — and Maximilian is the face of it. It’s fitting that it’s Aherne who snared the film’s sole Oscar nod for acting; he’s the one who garners our sympathy — and it’s Dieterle who exalts him. As we near the film’s midway mark, Maximilian discovers Napoleon III tricked him into accepting the title of emperor through a phony plebiscite and sets out to make things right: proposing a constitutional monarchy, with himself as Emperor and Juarez as Prime Minister. (When Juarez rejects the offer out of hand, it’s easy to wonder if a golden opportunity hasn’t somehow been missed.) As Maximilian suffers one setback after another, Dieterle engages in the sort of haunted lyricism that would become his trademark, and ties it to Maximilian’s mindset. He convinces you that there’s something undeniably virtuous about a man sacrificing himself for a cause, even if that cause was never real. “From first to last, you’ve been deceived,” his best friend and physician pleads with him: “Deceived by everybody, including yourself.” And Maximilian knows, but he can’t stop: “Is it not the sacred duty of a monarch to sacrifice his life for his people?” As he continues to respond to an imagined call to arms, scenes bleed into each other with an inevitability that grows unsettling, trapping him in an ordeal of his own making. POV shots draw the viewer deeper into his Don Quixote-like delusions. And by the time he’s preparing for what he knows will be his final battle, but urges his officers to sit down to one last meal with him, Dieterle plants him at the center of a long table, his followers on either side — like Jesus in The Last Supper — and you’re left caring less about Juarez’s efforts to uphold democracy and more about the downfall of a righteous man who arrived in Mexico with the best of intentions, on a fool’s errand. In his final speech, as he awaits his execution, he’s given not to lamenting his fate, but to praising Juarez — in effect, to validating him — for not sparing his life, but rather holding true to his principles; the speech is accompanied by the ticking of a clock, one that bleeds into the following scene — as if Maximilian’s generosity of spirit has seeped into the soul of a nation.
The movie — expected to be Warners’ next blockbuster biopic — received an unexpectedly chilly reception from audiences. Juarez posed challenging ethical questions: the kind they weren’t prepared to ponder. They had come to the movies to celebrate the virtues of democracy, and along comes this film, asking us to empathize with an emperor. But Dieterle refused to condescend to his audience. If they weren’t aware of Mexico’s complex political history, they should have been — or at the very least, they should have understood that Juarez’s legacy didn’t last long. The script obviously doesn’t reference the decades of double-dealing that followed Juarez’s presidency (Porfirio Díaz’s de facto dictatorship, the PRI’s control of power for 70 years), but in the way Dieterle frames Juarez’s cunning without endorsing it — in his refusal to step aside even after his term is up, in the pleasure he takes in initiating guerrilla warfare to undermine enemy forces, in the perverse way he interrupts the coronation of Maximilian’s heir — he reminds us that one of the dangers of representative government lies in its capacity to enable and reward the corrupt. And that revolutions (even the best intended) have consequences — and casualties. While in no way denigrating democracy, Dieterle asks us to consider how hard it is to achieve, and how much harder to maintain — and why the lure of monarchical rule can seem so potent. (Needless to say, the film has grown increasingly relevant over the last decade. See also The Searching Wind.) Dieterle was no doubt guided by his memory of how Germany’s constitutional monarchy was replaced by a parliamentary democracy in 1918, and how the next fifteen years were marked by economic hardship — and where it all led. Dieterle, devoutly anti-fascist, nonetheless muddies the political waters in a way that Warners never intended; instead, he forges a biopic with all the depth and power of his best work.
And then there’s THE LIFE OF EMILE ZOLA (1937), which — despite the critical huzzahs, despite the then-record 10 Academy Award nominations — is the weakest of the lot. The opening consists of as random an assortment of scenes as ever burdened a bio. It feels like you’re flying through Zola‘s life, because that’s exactly what you’re doing. The screenwriters give themselves just 20 minutes to elevate the wannabe author with his insatiable outrage from poverty to celebrity, then just 8 minutes more to age him into an elderly novelist resting on his laurels: taken to showing off the bric-a-brac he’s imported from abroad. (We accomplish the passage of time through a montage of books he’s authored, most of which mean nothing to us.) Oh, and he has a falling out with his best friend Cézanne, who condemns him for managing to lose his insatiable outrage in just 28 minutes.
And with the life of Emile Zola — the very title of the movie — established in some of the patchiest prose ever encountered, we cut to the focus of the film: the wrongful charges of treason leveled at Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus. Following a scene in which Dreyfus is framed in record time, officers raid his home, prompting his wife to declare, “My husband is innocent!” — at which point we cut to a newsboy holding up a paper with the headline “Dreyfus Found Guilty.” 48 minutes in, and they’re still scripting in shorthand. Soon after, Zola hears the court case referenced and declares, “Dreyfus, Dreyfus, Dreyfus! Must we be eternally plagued by that name?” — an overreaction at best. But he doesn’t give it another thought; relaxing at home, he informs his wife he’s so content that “there’s nothing more for me to desire.” And then there’s a knock at the door. 58 minutes in, and they’re still scripting in shorthand. And trite shorthand, at that.
It’s not until 67 minutes in that Zola — having grown convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence — recovers his sense of outrage; he publishes an open letter exposing the truth (“J’accuse”), confident that once he’s been sued for libel, he can retry Dreyfus’s case in the court of public opinion — and the film finally gets underway. (The Life of Emile Zola took home the Oscar for Best Screenplay; in hindsight, that can be seen as a miscarriage of justice second only to the Dreyfus Affair itself.) The movie gets better for actually getting started, but issues remain. As Dreyfus’s wife, Gale Sondergaard has a penchant for the sort of melodramatic masochism that Dieterle had trouble taming (see also Miriam Jordan in 6 Hours to Live and Verree Teasdale in Firebird); as Zola’s wife, Gloria Holden barely registers. And Muni serves up a fussy, mannered and overly emphatic performance that betrays all the thought that went into it. Acting honors go to Warners contract players Donald Crisp and Henry O’Neill, as Zola’s lawyer and chief witness, respectively. (O’Neill did 12 films for Dieterle between 1933 and 1940.) And as Dreyfus, Joseph Schildkraut defied his limited screen time and underwritten role to take home a well-deserved Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. (Writers Heinz Herald, Geza Herczeg and Norman Reilly Raine seem to expend so much energy on Muni’s courtroom speech, everyone else’s lines go limp. After Dreyfus is imprisoned on Devil’s Island — and we sit through that hoary device of the years scrolling by onscreen to indicate the length of his incarceration — the best they can offer Schildkraut is “I am innocent! I am innocent! I am innocent! I am innocent!”)
As for Dieterle, his work is handsome and proficient — but oddly muted. Oh, he has his triumphs, both big and small. At the start, we’re introduced to Zola in the humble Parisian garret he shares with Cézanne; the room is unusually well-lit — both for a Warners pic and for a Dieterle pic. Then Zola makes an excursion into a seedier section of town, where a woman has thrown herself into the Seine to avoid the anguish of starvation; shadows black out all but the essentials, hollowed-out faces poke through the darkness, and you feel like you’re watching a Warner Bros. film again. Even at the start, when Zola is at his most impoverished, Dieterle takes visual pains to show him one step removed from the country’s greatest crimes and injustices. He chronicles them, but never experiences them. And so his ultimate isolation, once he’s achieved a level of fame and wealth, doesn’t feel like a story rebooting itself or switching gears; Zola’s level of empathy was never matched by his level of poverty. (In a move that seems both wise and a little wicked, his home when he’s living his best life has the bright, even, high-key lighting and opulent look of an MGM set. He’s as far from his roots as, say, Warners is from Metro.) This is the kind of artistry at which Dieterle excelled. Shots don’t merely advance the narrative, but capture and clarify its themes. The film’s most moving moment comes when Dreyfus, upon learning of his acquittal, exits his prison cell, then turns around and walks back in — an action he repeats several times, as if the mere steps he’s taking can’t match the enormity of the moment. Like David Manners’ twin train rides in Man Wanted and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. scouring the streets in Scarlet Dawn, it’s clearly Dieterle’s own creation: a tribute to his ability to capture in silence all that the script has been unable to convey in prose. (Tellingly, the studio had no idea what Dieterle was trying to accomplish, and insisted he go back in and reshoot the scene, with Dreyfus simply leaving his cell and making for the nearest exit. And then, of course, once they screened the new scene, they realized Dieterle was right.)
But still: during the film’s patchy first hour, there are transitions that seem decidedly beneath Dieterle; at one point, after Zola and his wife converse in front of the fire, Dieterle pulls back behind the fire before cutting away: the sort of filmic cliché that went out with the nickelodeons. He had turned transitions into an art form in his second Hollywood film; he was adept at salvaging skeletal scripts. So why does he seem reluctant to put his full talents to use here? Dieterle reported late in life that Emile Zola was his favorite of his biopics. Great artists are often mistaken in their assessment of their work — and so it is with Dieterle. He no doubt was pleased and proud to take a stance against anti-Semitism, and the success of the film assured him that his umbrage was shared by audiences. But he couldn’t see that his reverence toward the title character and the subject matter made him play it far too safe in the interests of being earnest. (The movie so deifies Zola that when he’s being memorialized in the final scene, his casket on full display, two large beams of sunlight appear and illuminate his coffin. If that’s all I knew of Dieterle’s work, I’d think him as ineffectual as Sarris suggests.) The solemnity grows stultifying; as you grin and bear the cultivated good intentions of Emile Zola, it’s easy to cast your mind back to the aimless “anything goes” spirit of Louis Pasteur and think, “I miss the acrobats.” Dieterle’s sense of worship mutes his gifts. He seems afraid to comment on — much less correct — the screenplay, for fear of imposing himself on the story. That makes Zola his rare impersonal work, and an impersonal William Dieterle is almost a contradiction in terms. (Ironically, it proved his sole Academy Award nomination for Best Director.)
In between The White Angel and The Life of Emile Zola, as Warners determined how much of the company resources to pour into biopics, they shuttled Dieterle — as ever — from genre to genre: a comic whodunnit, a feel-good fable, an exotic romance. (Once Zola opened big, he was consigned to biopics. If his assignments grew less varied as a result, at least his B-movie days were finally behind him.) SATAN MET A LADY, Warners’ tongue-in-cheek treatment of their 1931 Maltese Falcon (which of course they’d remake again in 1941), is the oddball film that comes to life every time its leading lady exits the screen. The other players — Warren William, Arthur Treacher, Alison Skipworth and that blonde bunny Marie Wilson — understand well the film’s smirking, self-aware tone, and how to make the most of it. Only the leading lady seems dead behind those Bette Davis eyes. The trailer promises a character “as harmless as a hungry panther,” but Davis seems afraid to show her fangs. She keeps losing track of when she’s feigning innocence — she grins at the oddest times — and as a result, Davis comes off as miscast in her own vehicle. And Dieterle, with whom she’d developed a healthy working relationship on Fashions of 1934 and Fog Over Frisco, doesn’t offer much in the way of help. Athough he manages some memorable exchanges — including a block-comedy bit in which William and Treacher trade exposition while competing to toss a lampshade onto a frame — he disliked the script as much as Davis did, and turns in one of his weaker performances. (There’s something lackluster about the look — an uncommon complaint for a Dieterle film.) He wasn’t crazy about the script to THE GREAT O’MALLEY either: one of those inspirational fables studios loved turning out during the Depression (the only one Dieterle was handed). It’s a lightweight programmer that might’ve made a touching full-length feature. So much time is spent setting up the premise — a cop (Pat O’Brien) who adheres too closely to the letter of the law — it’s a letdown when the ensuing story-line is so skeletal and the roles left underdeveloped. (The script is from staff writer Milton Krims, who’d also do Reuters.) But O’Brien conveys his character’s change of heart convincingly (even if it occurs in record time), and a hollowed-out Humphrey Bogart — as a hapless victim of the criminal justice system, a purely reactive role he loathed — is equally effective. (The film came at a time when Jack Warner — convinced that Bogart was talentless — was giving him lousy parts so he’d break his contract.) And one of Warners’ second-tier art directors, Hugh Reticker, manages such a flawless recreation of the intersection of East Broadway and Montgomery St. on New York’s Lower East Side that Dieterle is able to achieve with atmosphere what he can’t with characterization. It’s a pleasantly forgettable film.
But ANOTHER DAWN is worth more serious discussion, because — like Scarlet Dawn and The Devil’s in Love — it anticipates the romantic melodramas that would become Dieterle’s stock-in-trade by the mid-’40s: Love Letters, Portrait of Jennie, The Accused. Another Dawn isn’t as good as those, but its desert landscape (an army post in Dubik) casts a spell; Dieterle embraces themes and stylistic conventions that we now think of as noir. Here, Kay Francis (in her fourth and final film with Dieterle) settles for marrying a colonel she doesn’t love (Ian Hunter), while pining for the younger captain (Errol Flynn) who reminds her of her late fiancé. Francis was exhausted at the start of filming, and no sooner had shooting commenced than she requested two months off to recuperate. You can tell which scenes were filmed before her vacation, but she uses her fatigue to her advantage; at her most frail, she makes it clear that the rigors of loving a man who died have taken their toll on her. And once she’s fully rested, she’s glorious; decked out once more in her customary Orry-Kelly gowns, she’s exactly the kind of glamour goddess that two men would fall for. Hunter is a sturdy enough actor to transcend the role of cuckold, and Flynn — as Hunter’s adjutant — captures all the distress and desire raging within. The dialogue gets pretty flowery at times — but that’s the sort of thing Dieterle was masterful at maneuvering. Near the end, Francis turns up in Flynn’s quarters and announces her plans to leave because she can’t go on “loving you, respecting him, hating myself.” She’s draped in a severe black dress with a soft white ruffled collar (she identifies as both perpetrator and victim), and Dieterle backs her against open shutters that signal her sense of imprisonment. Her eyes well up with tears, and a potentially hokey moment grows somehow transcendent.
Dieterle creates an atmosphere charged with unexpressed longing — one seemingly at odds with the regimented routine of army life. By day, the steady sway of the palm trees grows almost dizzying; at night, the moon streams through the shutters of the officers’ quarters, casting bars across the characters’ faces: heightening their feelings of futility. It’s not a setting conducive to sanity. Even the sandstorms — and there’s a doozy near the end — conspire against the characters: the natives describe them as “winds of madness.” Hell, even the military operations provide no relief: as Flynn leads his men on a mission, their horses sinking into the thick desert dunes, Dieterle and cinematographer Tony Gaudio set them upon mountains of sand so high that they practically brush up against the sun — like Icarus on the brink of his own doom. In Dubik, it’s impossible to outrun your obsessions. There are a host of smart lines in scenarist Laird Doyle’s script — loosely based on a play by Somerset Maugham — as well as scattered absurdities. (The officers live in such soundproof quarters that they’re unaware of the sandstorms raging beyond their walls.) At the end of the day, you have no idea if the movie will punish Francis and Flynn for their initial indiscretions or reward them for their subsequent self-sacrifice, and that suspense heightens the final scenes. You hope that true love will prevail — but under these circumstances, from such beginnings, does it ever?
Shortly after completing Zola, Dieterle freelanced for producer Walter Wanger on BLOCKADE (1938), one of the few Hollywood films to take on the Spanish Civil War. Blockade is commonly attacked today because of the limitations the Hays Office imposed on it. Unwilling to court controversy, they insisted the specifics of the war be omitted altogether; the Loyalists and Nationalists couldn’t even be named. Detractors claim that it’s impossible to discern something as simple as which side star Henry Fonda is fighting on, so the movie exists in a vacuum. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone who had read a newspaper in 1938 — or seen The March of Time — would have readily understood that Fonda was not fighting on the side supported by Nazi Germany; studio heads then were determined to remain impartial amidst the rising tensions in Europe (Louis B. Mayer bent over backward to appease Hitler), but its Oscar-nominated script by John Howard Lawson — who was later blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten — is clearly railing against fascism. Contemporary critics recognized instantly where its sympathies lay and held it in high regard. (“A picture you can praise to heaven.” — New York Post. “Thrilling action and intense suspense... an elaborate and beautifully mounted film.” — New York Daily News. “Satisfying and stirring. A film [that] deserves everyone's admiration because it has courage.” — New York World-Telegram.) Its political leanings were so unmistakable that the far-right Knights of Columbus condemned it as “Leftist propaganda,” while the conservative Catholic News denounced it as “subtle foreign political” agitprop.
Denied use of the details of the Spanish Civil War, Lawson fastened on a single element: one that even less informed audiences would readily understand. His screenplay took its cue from the bombing of Guernica, a town in northern Spain, in April of 1937; German pilots had left military targets untouched and aimed their explosives into the center of town, slaughtering 1000 civilians. Lawson (with uncredited assists from James M. Cain and Clifford Odets) penned an impassioned condemnation of the tactical bombing of private citizens, which would in fact become a chief military strategy during World War II. (Today, with civilians accounting for 90% of wartime casualties, the film feels timelier than ever.) When nearby bombing raids threaten the town where Fonda has his farm, prompting his neighbors to abandon their homes, he pleads with them naïvely, “Stop! Turn back! You may escape with your lives, but you won’t have anything to live for!” He doesn’t yet appreciate the ruthlessness of the enemy, or the changing face of modern warfare. But Fonda’s speech is subordinated to Dieterle’s visuals, which tell the real story: peasants making their way knee-deep through streams, their belongings stacked on their backs, their faces numb with terror as they try to outrun sounds that — mere days ago — they would have mistaken for thunder. And you understand intuitively that they’ll never hear thunder in the same way again. Every civilian assault is accompanied by an indelible image: a shelled apartment house collapsing around a baby in its crib; starving villagers lined up in front of empty shops, unwilling to accept that the shelves are bare. Lawson and Dieterle cry out for a humanitarian response that wouldn’t come for over a decade, until the Geneva Conventions branded the indiscriminate slaughter of private citizens a war crime.
The message of Blockade is rock solid. The way it’s delivered is wobblier. With the Hays Office on the hunt for any characters or situations they deemed too authentic — and therefore too controversial — Lawson was forced to engage in some unsubtle subterfuge to get his principal theme past the censors; he hid it in the sort of plot that wouldn’t have been out of place in a turn-of-the-century operetta. Will happy peasant Henry Fonda find love with beautiful Russian spy Madeleine Carroll? There are exchanges that sound like they were improvised on the set, badly. (“I’ve never met anyone like you before.” “I’ve never met anyone like you before.”) New characters appear without warning, and when they’ve served their purpose, they’re gone. And just past the midway mark, when Carroll is blackmailed into delivering a message to the enemy, and the movie seems to be gaining momentum, Reginald Denny and Leo Carrillo engage in a comic exchange about the origins of corned beef that feels like the warm-up to an Abbott and Costello radio routine. (Even Werner Janssen’s Oscar-nominated score sounds intrusive at times, like we’re hearing cues intended for some other scene than the one that ended up on the screen.)
But whatever the detour taken, Dieterle’s commitment to Lawson’s message gets the film back on track. There’s remarkably little polish for a Dieterle film; it looks as it feels, like scenes were rethought and re-shot on a moment’s notice. But as his camera pans across dozens of extras, there’s not one who seems unaware of the mission. Despite sets that are clear studio constructions, with painted backdrops to the rear, the villagers’ faces — resolute yet inconsolable — stay with you long after the closing credits have rolled. And although it’s hard to know what to make of Fonda’s performance (most of the time, his objective is clear, but occasionally he succumbs to an unnerving case of overacting that he mistakes for sincerity), Carroll is a luminous viewer surrogate. She makes it easy to believe that someone who spent her life immune to the suffering of others could have a sudden change of heart — that seeing the misery and starvation of ordinary citizens politicizes her. The film’s championing of the common people against oppressive forces allows the cast and creative team full access to their outrage — and for all its compromises and absurdities, it packs a punch. In fact, I’ll take it a step further. Blockade — one of Dieterle’s most overlooked and maligned works — is the start of his greatest period: 15 consecutive films that he pours himself into with such intelligence, instinct, finesse and élan that he — as Mordaunt Hall predicted — “[makes] a poor story interesting and a good story a masterpiece.” There are a lot of good stories scattered among these 15 films.
With Dieterle very much in demand (he had just won Warner Bros. its first Best Picture statue, after all), it’s no surprise that RKO soon came calling. George Schaefer served as president of RKO from 1938 to 1942, and in many ways, those were the studio’s glory years. Schaefer showered projects with such lavish budgets that they rarely turned a profit, but the films he shepherded were a prodigious lot, including Citizen Kane, Gunga Din, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, The Magnificent Ambersons — and three from Dieterle. The second and third were financed by Dieterle’s own production company; he chose RKO to distribute after enjoying his first film work with the studio, directing 1939’s THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME. Hunchback, the third screen adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, is a beloved work; I’ve seen viewers and reviewers proclaim it their favorite film. My response is a touch chillier; in taking on this reassessment of Dieterle’s Hollywood career, I could point to Hunchback as proof that I still had my wits about me where Dieterle was concerned. Although I admire the performances, the look, the lensing and the extraordinary mise-en-scène (with thousands of extras executing a mob mentality), I find the script — for the first half, at least — strangled by heavy-handed exposition and plot-driven design.
Despite an opening scroll that charts France’s hopeful passage out of the Middle Ages — and the superstition and prejudice that stood in the way of progress — screenwriter Sonya Levien feels a need to restate it all in the first few scenes: the King’s embrace of the printing press, his acceptance that the world is round, and his empathy for the oppressed — all while his advisors warn him that any change to the status quo could lead to anarchy. There’s too much plot camouflaged as characterization (Louis VI: “I’m glad I’m living in this age of great beginnings”), and it’s not merely the King who’s afflicted; the poet Gregoire is scarcely allowed to open his mouth without recapping or setting a scene. (“This day! First people ridiculed me, then I found you, then I lost you. And now, here we are together — married!”) And as if the fickleness of the crowds — who lust only for sensation — were somehow contagious, the lead characters don’t seem blessed with common sense or consistency either. The gypsy Esmeralda is quickly established as the worst judge of character in screen history. (She’s naive in the novel, but it’s worse here.) She flees from Quasimodo, bell ringer of Notre Dame cathedral, even though she’s been assured he’s harmless; she swears eternal devotion to Phoebus, Captain of the King’s Guards, following an interaction lasting roughly eight seconds; and most outrageously, she advises Chief Justice Frollo, who’s done nothing but threaten her, “Somewhere in your heart there must be love.” (She tells him this after he admits he likes animals, although for all she knows, he means that he likes them seared on a grill and delicately seasoned.)
No one would ever claim that Hugo's novel — with its plea for the preservation of the Paris's Gothic architecture embedded in a tale of love, lust, religion and prejudice — lends itself to easy adaptation. But that said, whenever Levien adheres to the novel — or to the 1923 silent film — she’s on surer ground; it’s in details of her own imagining — e.g., the reduction of Phoebus to little more than a prop, Gregoire’s resultant reinvention as a romantic lead — that she stumbles. The early passages sacrifice clear-cut characterization to spectacle. Because Levien deletes a host of characters and subplots from the book, the big set-pieces (the Feast of Fools, the Court of Miracles) are asked to pull more weight than they can handle — and although Dieterle puts on a great show, we’re not given much cause to care. It’s not until 50 minutes in — in the aftermath of Quasimodo’s public flogging — that we’re allowed to linger on an emotional beat. Here, in a moving confluence of acting, direction, design and music, Esmeralda senses Quasimodo’s pain and instantly, instinctually climbs the stairs of the pillory, water in her wineskin, reaching out to a creature whose features had once sent her fleeing into the dark Parisian night. Having been mocked by the masses and abandoned by his guardian, Quasimodo is initially mistrustful, refusing her gesture. But her radiance and defiance prove compelling; her empathy not only enables her to see through to his innocent soul, but brings that soul to the fore, and he positions himself to accept the water like a compliant child. It’s the first time in the film you sense something of consequence happening. (The sequence is silent. Of course it is.) And at that moment, the film finds its footing. Like Esmeralda’s offering to Quasimodo, the ensuing passages — the murder of Phoebus and the trial of Esmeralda, the King’s interrogation of Frollo and the siege of Notre Dame — feel character- rather than plot-driven. And the subtleties and ironies grow naturally out of the deepening design, instead of seeming superimposed on the story-line. For the record, I praise Dieterle often as someone who could finesse a lengthy or unlikely setup. (See Love Letters, 1945, where the pieces also take 50 minutes to click into place, yet Dieterle salvages the exposition by honing in on the emotional heart of the story.) But when the early reels are comprised of incidents as random as those here and responses as excessive (“So you don’t love me. It was nothing but pity, pity, pity!”), I don’t see what more he could have done.
Dieterle enjoys remarkable rapport with cinematographer Joseph H. August (their first of three collaborations), art director Van Nest Polglase and makeup designer Perc Westmore. The movements of the masses, as they congregate or scatter, have a choreographed precision (they’re often captured from high atop the cathedral towers), yet their faces are as infused with specificity as those of the villagers in Blockade. The level of visual detail and ambition is imposing — but so is the degree of soulfulness. Few directors of his generation were able to project their own love of movies onto the screen as Dieterle did; he was a romanticist in the manner of (two-time Oscar winner) Frank Borzage — whose best films captured the spiritual and transformative power of love — but he had a clearheadedness of purpose that kept him from getting lost in reverie. He could stage a spectacle with the best of them (and in many ways, Hunchback is the culmination of everything he’d learned since making his directorial debut in 1923), but he could also refresh a simple exchange with penetrating insight. The conversation between Quasimodo and Esmeralda in the bell tower is Dieterle at his best. During a series of questions and confessions, the two forge a connection — Esmeralda at once grateful and confused, charmed and alarmed; Quasimodo, wounded by longing and self-pity. Dieterle keeps the tone measured but the staging fluid. Quasimodo is consistently shot among his surroundings: the scaffolding, the ropes, the bells. It’s the setting that keeps him comfortable — and holds him hostage. Esmeralda is captured mostly in gauzy close-up: a creature of pure emotion, unencumbered and attached to nothing. In his filming of this crucial scene, Dieterle not only sets up Quasimodo’s heartbreak to come, but justifies the largely inconsistent way that Esmeralda has been written. He regularly attends to issues the script overlooks, and his handling of the cast is masterful throughout. The performances — not just from Charles Laughton (whose interpretation of Quasimodo inspired everyone from Leonard Nimoy to Ron Perlman to Rufus Sewell to pursue acting), but from Hollywood newcomers Maureen O’Hara, Edmond O’Brien and Walter Hampden, plus veterans Cedric Hardwicke, Thomas Mitchell and Harry Davenport — are well-nigh flawless.
As noted, I have my issues with Hunchback. I find if I can get to the midway mark, I’m gratified to continue to the end — but I’ve started and stopped the film as many times as I’ve finished it. But how I love Dieterle’s next project with RKO: a movie with the same power to entertain and surprise that it had 80 years ago. THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER is at once a dark fairy tale and a glistening fever dream. It’s a morality play about the corrupting power of greed, an allegorical critique of American isolationism and a socialist treatise on the value of unionism. It’s also, like so many works dealing with the devil, a hell of a lot of fun.
In 1840’s New Hampshire, the devil comes to call on impoverished farmer Jabez Stone. The devil is Walter Huston in a goatee, both huckster and conman; Stone is James Craig, eager faced and easy prey. Stone hasn’t got a prayer. He willingly agrees to part with his soul for seven years of wealth. The Faust legend had inspired countless adaptations over the years; Dieterle, who had appeared in F. W. Murnau's 1926 silent film Faust, decided that Stephen Vincent Benét's short story The Devil and Daniel Webster would be an ideal first feature for his new production company, and invited Benét himself to do the adaptation.
Dieterle’s version honors the German Expressionist elements in Murnau’s film — with its large painted sets, sharp contrast of light and dark, enormous shadows and extreme angles — but it also revels in the sort of technical and story-telling wizardry that Schaefer’s tenure at RKO seemed to inspire: magnificent mobile camera work, impressive time compression montages and complex shots involving long, continuous passages of dialogue. Add in August’s chiaroscuro photography, Robert Wise’s lightning-quick editing and Bernard Herrmann’s Oscar-winning score (which rebrands folk songs with a demonic twist) and you’ve got that rare item from the Golden Age of Hollywood: a major-studio art film. (The 106-minute film premiered in 1941 as All That Money Can Buy; the studio feared the original title made it sound too much like a historical piece. It was later distributed as The Devil and Daniel Webster, then recut in 1952 as Daniel and the Devil, clocking in at just 84 minutes. It took nearly half a century for the lost footage to be located.)
The New York Herald Tribune proclaimed the film “a rare motion picture achievement.” The New York World-Telegram called it “superbly acted, directed and written.” The New York Post hailed it as “one of the season’s best pictures.” And The New York Times did not like it at all. So I guess it’s time now to discuss the nightmare that is Bosley Crowther. Something odd happened around the time Dieterle formed his own production company; Crowther took over as lead film critic for The New York Times and decided he hated Dieterle. It’s long been my assertion that Crowther was the single worst film critic to ever grace the pages of a major metropolitan newspaper. He loved to posture that he was a staid intellectual, but he could be petty and irrational when it came to airing his grievances. I discussed him briefly in my essay on Errol Flynn, one of the stars Crowther loathed for impenetrable reasons. Alan Ladd, Loretta Young, James Dean and Joan Crawford were others. (He didn’t just hate Ladd, he actively mocked his fans.) And no director offended him — deeply, personally, unaccountably — like Dieterle. And it all starts with The Devil and Daniel Webster, which according to Crowther
“…should be one of the best pictures of the year, [but] it is not. For Mr. Dieterle has failed to bring into related focus before our eyes that which is supposed to be real and that which is supernatural. One is likely to be confused by the constant interplay of shadow and substance without any explanations. Neither has Mr. Dieterle the ‘feel’ of New England in his film. The sets are too obviously artificial; the fields and hills are mostly painted backdrops. This is one picture which should have been shot against the solid New Hampshire earth. And it should have been directed by someone who understood New England.”
To this day, I don’t think I’ve seen a stranger review from a major-league film critic. Could Crowther really not distinguish between the real and the supernatural, as he claims? When the devil (aka Scratch) makes his first appearance in an explosion of streaming, glowing backlight — accompanied by Herrmann’s eerie mélange of telephone wires humming and animals moaning — did Crowther truly not see that as suggestive of his unearthly origins? When Stone throws an ax at Scratch and — through a mix of stop-motion substitution, rear projection and traveling matte — the ax bursts into flame before hitting its target, did Crowther not recognize that as a demonstration of Satan’s power? (Did he suppose the ax spontaneously combusted?) Did Crowther not view the out-of-focus camerawork at Stone’s self-congratulatory ball — or the filtration that saturates the prisoners at his trial — as confirmation that the creatures in attendance were not of this world? And when Stone makes his pact with the devil, and Dieterle leaves the upper half of his face in light while casting the bottom half into shadow, could Crowther not picture it as a visual manifestation of the conflict raging within: Stone’s greed and despair blotting out his reason? Dieterle makes his points with such precision, it’s unfathomable that anyone — let alone the voice of the Times — could be so confused.
And the notion of the film not capturing the “feel” of New England is absurd. I grew up in New Hampshire, the setting of The Devil and Daniel Webster. On my drive to high school, I passed a town and a farm (with fields beside them and hills beyond) exactly like the ones in the film — that is, if they were reimagined as a pastoral idyll in a painting by John Constable or Thomas Cole. (The hardiness, the stubbornness, the prayerfulness and the pridefulness of the characters ring true as well.) And how in heavens is a fantasy about a man brokering a deal with the devil “one picture which should’ve been shot against the solid New Hampshire earth?” Is Crowther really arguing that the chief aim of a Faustian fable should be realism? And his assertion that it should’ve been directed by someone “who understands New England” might be the biggest reach of all. Is he suggesting someone who understands New England in 1840? (Which studio director would that be exactly?) Or is he implying the land and its people hadn’t changed in a century? (And if Crowther is honestly insisting that directors should be assigned to films only if they’re well-versed in the setting, then the hypocrisy is unforgivable, because he had no reservations about praising How Green Was My Valley a mere 12 days later, even though John Ford shot the Welsh film with Irish performers and Irish tunes — and admitted to an almost proud ignorance of Welsh customs.) The Devil and Daniel Webster is a portrait of America at its best and its worst; it’s about the lure of capitalism, and the disregard for the plight of one’s fellowmen that often accompanies the accumulation of wealth. As a German expat, it’s arguable that Dieterle recognized — and thus captured — those qualities better than someone who was born here.
Something in Crowther’s hardwiring short-circuited between his reverential review of Dieterle for A Dispatch From Reuters and his obtuse and patronizing critique of his work on The Devil and Daniel Webster — and whatever caused Crowther to crack (the increasing politicization of Dieterle’s films, perhaps?), it was a wound that only worsened. Dieterle was at the peak of his creative powers, and everyone knew it. Notably, each time a critic subbed for Crowther, the result was a rave — both for the film and for Dieterle himself: on Tennessee Johnson, on Kismet, on The Accused, on Rope of Sand. And that seemed to incense Crowther all the more, prompting even nastier notices. Did his regular bashing of Dieterle play a part in the sullying of Dieterle’s reputation? How could it not? Did it contribute to his eventual inability to get work? Quite possibly.
But enough about Crowther. Thank goodness The New York Times now has its head on straight where Dieterle is concerned.
Oh, wait.
“Best remembered for plodding prestige pictures like The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Dieterle has been typecast as a snobbish martinet. Still, he has a few surprises in his lengthy résumé.” — J. Hoberman (The New York Times, 2015)
I would question if Dieterle is really best remembered today for Emile Zola. Aren’t cineasts far more likely to think of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or The Devil and Daniel Webster, or romances like Love Letters or Portrait of Jennie? Aren’t those the films that have lingered in the public consciousness? Regardless, denigrating Dieterle in this fashion helps make Hoberman’s case that he has “a few surprises in his lengthy résumé.” (Just a few, mind you.) I come away from that quote suspecting that Hoberman knows little of Dieterle’s work or temperament. Nothing I’ve read suggests that Dieterle was typecast — then or now — as “a snobbish martinet.” Brian Aherne, three decades after Juarez, was still struck by Dieterle’s “burning eyes and strictly formal manners” and warmly recalled his “classic actor’s voice” announcing each take. Bette Davis looked back on Dieterle fondly and — far from thinking him too strict — felt his only flaw lay in being too deferential in his early years. (Otherwise, he “could have been one of the most important directors in Hollywood.”) On the two films developed and financed by his own production company, Dieterle insisted on title sequences that eschewed the standard Hollywood format. The actors’ names scrolled by, followed by those of the creative team — all in the same size and type, with no indication of “who did what.” (That information was reserved for the end credits.) And the scroll concluded by noting that all of them “collaborated on the picture.” Dieterle aimed to stress the egalitarian nature of filmmaking — hardly the mindset of a martinet.
Only Paul Muni’s biographer, Jerome Lawrence, uses the “m” word, remarking how — on Muni’s first day of shooting Dr. Socrates — Dieterle reminded him of a “Prussian martinet.” But it’s an ironic reference to Muni’s father (himself a Prussian martinet), and to Dieterle’s obsession with micromanaging the start and end times of each day of shooting. Everyone in Hollywood became familiar with Dieterle’s quirks. His wife Charlotte was obsessed with numerology and astrology, and insisted he neither start a picture nor sign an actor unless the stars were in alignment. (As Lawrence puts it, “Dieterle, brilliant in every department except this,” acquiesced.) Hal Wallis recalls with amusement Dieterle’s request to shoot one insert scene for Louis Pasteur four days before the scheduled start date — and at the precise time of 9:10 AM — because he had received word from his wife that that moment was most favored by fate. (Whether Dieterle, indoctrinated by his wife, became a true believer over time or was on occasion merely humoring Charlotte remains unclear.) But although he could be a stickler for odd things like start times, nothing points to him being a taskmaster or tyrant like DeMille or Ford or — more to the point, perhaps — his Warner Bros. colleague Curtiz, who would willingly sacrifice horses and humans alike if it achieved the desired sense of realism. As opposed to colleagues who ruled by intimidation, Dieterle insisted in 1937 that “a favorable atmosphere” was “the supreme task of the director ….. How can anyone [work] if he is embarrassed, or if he feels a sense of inefficiency, of failure? To create success one [must] create the spirit of enthusiasm. This works miracles.”
As for “snobbish,” perhaps Hoberman is referencing the white gloves Dieterle always wore on the set — although Dieterle was candid about their origins. During his years in Germany when he was not only directing and acting in films, but attending to the technical elements, Dieterle often had to stop a scene to fix the set — and wearing gloves kept his hands from getting dirty before shooting recommenced. Those gloves became a fixture of his directing apparel; perhaps they were a good-luck charm (lots of artists have them), or perhaps — as some have recalled — they permitted him to touch an actor’s face during filming to get the precise angle he wanted. But given that we know the reason he started wearing his white gloves, it’s an odd presumption that he continued to do so because he was (as Hoberman puts it) snobbish.
Anyway, the next film from Dieterle’s production company took on cultural appropriation; man, talk about snobbish. SYNCOPATION (1942) is a musical marvel that’s been almost willfully misunderstood for nearly a century. (It’s the film Hoberman was referring to when he mentioned “a few surprises,” and like his predecessor, he chose to willfully misunderstand it.) Syncopation is another film where we have to weed out preconceptions. Because Dieterle had to cave to his investors on a few key points — they insisted the social and racial commentary be subordinated to the love story — the legend has grown that the film grew somehow tame and diluted in the process. That presumption does a disservice to Dieterle, who was no stranger to late-stage rewrites. The onscreen romance between real-life sweethearts Bonita Granville and Jackie Cooper takes up more time than Dieterle initially intended, yes, and Todd Duncan (the original Porgy in Porgy and Bess, in his only screen appearance), whose role was meant to be pivotal, receives a rather cursory sendoff midway through. But the changes do minimal damage, because Syncopation — unlike most every other Hollywood property at the time — is not a character-driven film.
Syncopation is about the musical and social fabric of the United States, from the turn of the 20th century through to World War II. It’s about how sounds forged in African-American communities were adopted and adapted by white musicians, and how expressions of sorrow became remedies for it. It’s about gospel and the blues, marching bands and ragtime — the sounds that fused to form jazz — but crucially, although they’re heard throughout, they’re never referenced by name. Syncopation isn’t one of those films where someone sits at the piano and announces, “I’ve just come up with a great new sound. I call it ragtime!” It understands that jazz arose from a variety of sources — many of which overlapped in style, and many of which weren’t named until decades after the fact. And while the film ostensibly chronicles the life of a newly married pair — and the husband’s efforts to find work as a jazz trumpeter — what it really charts is how the changing sounds of music dictate their life choices. In Syncopation, everything we commonly think of as plot — the central couple falling in love, the boyhood friend who doesn’t return from the war, the mother who barely gets to celebrate her son’s fame before she dies — is mere connective tissue. Front and center is a story about the roots and growth of American music, and its power as both a balm and a tonic.
Music is everywhere in Syncopation: if folks aren’t playing or singing it, they’re humming or whistling it, often unknowingly. It’s not just the stuff of churches and nightclubs; it insinuates itself into classrooms and courtrooms, into private homes and boarding houses. And it’s not just entertainment; it’s currency. In Syncopation, music is how you reassure people, or impress them, or seduce them, or just plain reach them. The set-pieces — and there are many — are musical statements: not mere performances, but statements about how the sounds of a community are evolving. Early in the film, Granville’s family relocates from New Orleans to Chicago by journeying up the Mississippi by paddleboat. But the accent isn’t on them. The accent is on the evolving sounds that echo from the shore: from the street-corner soulfulness of Basin Street to the ragtime-infused syncopations of Beale Street, from the thumping “jump blues” of St. Louis to the sprawling urban style of Chicago. And those sounds drive the plot. Syncopation is the only classic Hollywood film I can think of where the actual subject is music: music not as a profession or as entertainment, not as a backdrop for — or evocation of — people’s lives, not as an expression of heightened emotions or innermost thoughts, but music as the propulsive force that shapes the narrative.
Syncopation starts with a gut punch of a prologue that must’ve startled a filmgoing public steeped in jingoism. The opening credits land us in an African desert, where we focus on the feet of villagers engaged in a ritual circle dance, set to the sound of drums. We pull back to a tribal chief being shown fineries by a pair of American traders — a parasol, a top hat. One of the traders opens a trunk, which we assume will be filled with other treasures, but it’s stockpiled with shackles. We cut instantly to an overhead shot of newly-bound slaves being lowered into the belly of a ship. (Syncopation isn’t going to pull any punches. Like a lot of Dieterle’s classics of this era, it asks us to look at the damage inflicted by the worst of humanity.) The boat makes its way west, and we crossfade to slaves on a plantation; in the first sustained music cue, we hear them humming a quiet, sad lament as they pick cotton. Cut to New Orleans, 1906, and the segregated Black community has traded their sorrow songs for spirituals (here, the lively “No More Auction Block for Me”) that connect them to their heritage. (The voices are the famed Hall Johnson Choir, as exultant as ever.) And now that the film has established where “American music” comes from, the plot gets underway. We regroup at a music academy for Black students, and a boy named Reggie Tearbone noodling on the cornet.
Reggie’s instructor urges him to adopt a more classical approach, but Reggie is a born improviser: “Music on paper don’t mean nothing to me.“ In no time, he’s wooed by the proprietor of a local club (also a cornet man) to try out his talent there, and at a late-night performance, the two face off in a mid-tempo blues to a shuffle beat. After the first refrain, the pair sit out, and piano and guitar are left playing, exposing the sounds of the customers’ feet as they dance, creating their own sort of music (a common practice in clubs of that era) — the shot of feet in motion recalling the very first image in the movie. Reggie’s mama, Ella — mammy to Granville’s character Kit (then only 8) — enters the club, sees her son onstage and drags him out; her sense of propriety prompts her to reject the music of New Orleans’ red-light district. But later, when young Kit gets the news that her family is moving to Chicago and goes to bed in tears, Ella consoles her by taking the tune she just heard and riffing on it: reimagining it as a soothing spiritual, fitting it to lyrics that suit the moment. It’s not the same melody — more like a blues variation. But the source and the statement are clear.
Dieterle hired Philip Yordan to write the screenplay, and the two imagined Syncopation less as a strict narrative and more as a jazz rhapsody, where themes are established, then reappear — infused with new meaning, assumed by different players. And that’s how it unfolds. Wandering the streets of Chicago on her 18th birthday, Kit finds herself drawn to the sound of a solo piano wafting from a nearby window, and the ragged rhythms she associates with home. She joins a party in progress, reveling in the sound of ragtime — first from the promoter at the piano, then from the singer atop it, who does a period-accurate, ragtime-infused rendition of “You Made Me Love You.” (It may be startling to folks who know the song best from Judy Garland’s soulful 1938 reinterpretation.) The promoter tries to impress Granville with a snatch of a song he’s written, but she recognizes it as something from her childhood: that same bit of blues that her mammy sang to her before they boarded the boat for Chicago. She seats herself at the piano to show what she means, but can’t resist embellishing the tune with the latest craze from New Orleans: a boogie-woogie beat that’s foreign to this Midwest audience. And the novelty of that sound — which prompts neighbors to call the cops, condemning it as “music of the low places, the iniquitous places” — lands the fair young Kit in jail, just like so many Black musicians who tried to introduce new sounds to the South. In Syncopation, images and ideas are constantly intersecting and colliding. Early on, Ella characterizes the music of her people as “trouble music.” (“When folks has got trouble, they get it off their mind by singing.”) Near the end, when New Orleans Dixieland has finally been embraced by white Chicago, songstress Connee Boswell reminds her audience of its origins with that same phrase: “When clouds conceal you/ Let trouble music bring a passing tear/ When they reveal you/ That trouble music’s gonna disappear.” And the title of that song — “Falling Star” — harks back to a recurring set-piece in which young Reggie determines to “blow them stars right out of the sky” with his cornet — i.e., to play with such passion that he causes a star to flicker and fall: a metaphor not only for the power of music, but for the hunger of his people to overcome adversity.
Unsurprisingly, given Dieterle’s involvement, Syncopation is progressive in its politics; children and musicians of all colors play together in this version of America. Midway though, struggling trumpet player Jackie Cooper hears Todd Duncan’s jazz band in action and begs for a chance to sit in on a jam session. (When Cooper tell Duncan that he’s never heard anything like the music he plays, audiences south of the Mason-Dixon line surely bristled at Duncan’s response: “You just ain’t been to the right place, boy.” And Dieterle was no doubt delighted.) Cooper asks if he can sit in, and in an all-night session, Duncan teaches him a thing or two about collective improvisation; Cooper is so energized that he stays till dawn, ignoring his military curfew and winding up behind bars. (This new music keeps landing white people in a whale of trouble.) But he shrugs off his time in jail. He’s a musician, and perhaps he intuits that there are worse times ahead. Later still, when he’s secured a gig with a big-city orchestra that postures it brings jazz to the general public (it’s a savage sendup of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and its self-proclaimed mission to “make a lady out of jazz”), he finds the blandness of the material enervating. His mechanical playing, night after night, induces a sort of deadened delirium — and as he stares at the notes on his score, they suddenly lift off the page, expanding and contorting until he finds himself imprisoned behind a staff of music, ripping apart the leger lines in an attempt to break free. His time in the slammer was easy; it’s his musical confinement that feels torturous.
Only when it pursues a more traditional path near the end — no doubt because of the investors’ interference — does the film falter. There’s too much time spent with the young newlyweds squabbling over whether his objective should be self-expression or paying the rent — the kind of conflict too common to Hollywood films of this sort. But the film recovers strongly, stepping away from the characters and returning to the music that inspires them. The narrative’s final set-piece — during the successful launch of a nightclub featuring Cooper and his band — highlights the triumph of those who prize jazz over those who seek to profit from it, and at the climax of the scene, the newlyweds rejoice in their newfound optimism — not that their love will last, but that their kind of music will. How do they know? From the sounds of the patrons’ feet against the floor when the music drops to a diminuendo. (The film’s postscript is a wild time-leap into the ’40s — embracing the swing era — and you will never see more a compelling reason why Gene Krupa became a superstar. You will also never see an odder case of an audience indicting itself. Readers of the Saturday Evening Post were asked to vote on whom they wanted to see in the final swing-band sequence — and fittingly, they chose some of the greatest players of the day. But not one is Black. Viewers at the time no doubt overlooked it, but now it seems a pungent reminder of the casual racism and cultural appropriation that Dieterle and his colleagues hoped to call attention to.) The ambitions of Syncopation dwarf even those of The Devil and Daniel Webster; occasionally, its accomplishments do too. Had Dieterle’s production company been able to support itself, who knows what he might’ve managed. But in the meantime, following the financial failure of these two films, Dieterle was back to freelance work. But great freelance work.
MGM wanted to tell the story of Andrew Johnson, the first (and at that time only) US President to be impeached, so naturally they turned to Dieterle, master of the biopic. The opening scene of TENNESSEE JOHNSON — in which Johnson (Van Heflin), an escapee from an apprenticeship, cuts his shackles — could be seen as a metaphor for Dieterle’s career; having cut the cord with Warner Bros., who insisted their biopics be dignified (if not downright solemn), Dieterle is free to reconnect with the impudence that had distinguished his earliest Hollywood films. That said, Tennessee Johnson is an odd work. Johnson’s temper, his early illiteracy, his feelings of inferiority — those have basis in historical fact. But the centerpiece of the film — the clashes between him and Thaddeus Stevens (Lionel Barrymore) about the proper treatment of the post-Civil War South — regularly misrepresents both parties in the interests of making Johnson a latter-day hero. What does ring true is the screenplay’s exposé of corruption on Capitol Hill: the politicians who exploit the shaky balance of power between federal and states’ rights for personal gain; the government overreach that allows enterprising individuals to expand their wealth and keep the poor in their place. So although the resulting film may be a ruthless piece of fiction where Johnson is concerned, it’s also a smart bit of subversive Americana. Having enjoyed their association with Dieterle, MGM kept him around for KISMET (1944), which was lovingly received and lavishly attended. Its relative obscurity today can be blamed on the auteur theory. (It’s to blame for so much.) Because Vincent Minnelli directed the musical version in 1955 (a clunky film, and a box office flop to boot), Dieterle’s film has been largely ignored, while auteurists poke through the ashes of Minnelli’s movie, searching for signs of his signature. (A common pastime of auteurists is turning rhetorical somersaults to elevate their heroes’ biggest stinkers into works of art.) If Minnelli couldn’t manage the material, they ask, how could Dieterle? And the answer is: with ease and panache. Ronald Colman, Marlene Dietrich and Edward Arnold understand exactly how their onscreen personae connect with audiences, and Dieterle encourages them to tweak them for maximum mileage. They seem to be having a grand time. (A 22-year-old Dietrich had made one of her earliest screen appearances in the first film Dieterle directed: 1923’s Der Mensch am Wege, a.k.a. Man by the Roadside.) As film critic Pauline Kael has observed, the stars “look blithe and take it easy,” and the result is “less strenuous than most costume films of the period.” Indeed, vast passages have the gossamer feel of a fairytale, and every time the pastel-green palace walls rise to just this side of heaven, it’s like someone’s smoking a hookah, and its hallucinatory effects have wafted off the screen and enveloped your senses. The film received four Academy Award nominations.
Dieterle — highly sought after — was scooped up next by executive producer David O. Selznick. Unlike Selznick’s previous wartime drama, Since You Went Away, I’LL BE SEEING YOU (released on Christmas Eve, 1944) isn’t about the sacrifices we face while fighting a common enemy; it tightens its focus, exposing the plight of soldiers returning from overseas, and the mental and physical wounds they’re left to overcome. (The Best Year of Our Lives would take a broader and better look at the same subject two Christmases later.) As it takes place during the Yuletide season, and features a budding relationship between Ginger Rogers (a secretary incarcerated for the accidental death of her boss) and Joseph Cotten (a soldier suffering from shell shock), it’s sometimes described as a “holiday romance.” And yes, it’s possible to see it as affirmation of the restorative power of love; in fact, that very much seems to be the film that screenwriter Marion Parsonnet and producer Pandro Berman intended. (Print ads promised “A Lifetime Crowded into Eight Days of Paradise!”) But what Dieterle focuses on are Rogers and Cotten’s isolation, their terror, their bitterness and their reserve — all of it in stark contrast to those going about their lives: opening presents and decorating trees — and pretending that nothing much has changed since the U.S. entered the war, except maybe it’s a little harder to get chocolate. Dieterle had a flair for forging characters who seem perched between despair and deliverance, desperate to shield themselves from pain while — quite despite themselves — plunging headfirst into danger. They were both fearful and reckless. I suspect if anything in Dieterle’s catalog makes mincemeat of the auteur theory, it’s this film. It’s technically sound and thematically rich — full of grace notes that you recognize at once as common to Dieterle’s work. It’s also got that requisite tug-of-war that Sarris deemed essential to auteurism, since Dieterle is painting a more disturbing picture of American life than Berman and Parsonnet intended. Yet for all the emotion Dieterle wrings from the screenplay, the film remains restrained by a paper-thin plot that exposes its radio-play origins (“when will he discover she’s a convict?” quickly becomes its only hook); by a grating performance by former child star Shirley Temple that betrays her uneasy transition into adolescence; and by a deliberately non-threatening design in which even Cotten’s PTSD attack is too tidily resolved. Parsonnet’s marching orders were clearly “heartwarming, but socially significant,“ but she can’t manage to give either its full due. And as a result, a Dieterle film that one could argue firmly establishes the artist as an auteur is also — of all the motion pictures he directed during the 1940’s — one of his slightest.
As opposed to Dieterle’s next film, LOVE LETTERS (1945), which is a pivotal work. (It’s the first of nine films he’d direct for producer Hal Wallis — formerly of Warner Bros. — between 1945 and 1951.) Another wartime drama, it has none of the noble intentions that I’ll Be Seeing You parades like a badge of honor; as a matter of fact, it would be easy to read a synopsis and presume it’s sentimental twaddle. But with Dieterle supervising stars Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten — plus sterling support from Gladys George, Cecil Kellaway, Ann Richards and Anita Louise — Love Letters becomes so much richer than a summary would suggest. Screenwriter Ayn Rand (in one of her two Hollywood assignments) takes the source material — Christopher Massie’s novel Pity My Simplicity, which she described (accurately) as “a holy mess” — strips it bare and rebuilds it as a meditation on grief and guilt. It’s about two romantic souls forced to face the pain of their pasts; who better to film it than Dieterle?
Love Letters starts with one soldier’s foolish act of kindness, and from there, events spiral out of control. And by the time the soldier has been injured, treated and relieved of duty, he’s left to survey the damage: his army buddy murdered, the woman of his dreams institutionalized, her guardian hospitalized. And he blames himself for it all. Alan Quinton (Cotten, in his second of five films with Dieterle) wants only to escape, but fate refuses to cut him loose. At a party, he meets Singleton (Jones, in her first of two films with Dieterle) and realizes she’s the woman he was writing love letters to throughout the war. (He was penning the notes for his army pal, but found himself opening up in ways he couldn’t to his own fiancée.) Singleton is as damaged as he is; she’s endured a trauma she’s blocked out entirely. Yet the two of them remain kindred spirits. "Ever since I came back from the war, l've wanted to be alone,” he confesses to her: “I've been miserable with other people. You're the first one with whom I feel at peace." And she understands: "That's because you're broken up inside almost the same as I am.”
Throughout his career, Dieterle had an unerring instinct for tapping into the emotional core of a film. Nowhere is that talent put to better use than in Love Letters. Rand takes her time setting the plot in motion — a full 50 minutes elapse before the two stars push past the exposition — but you never feel bogged down in backstory. Dieterle’s camera is unusually fluid, even for him, and his characters never sit still to trade information; they get on with their lives: ironing and packing clothes and peeling potatoes. And as details come to light, Dieterle bathes them in psychological beats — and strong ones: alienation and obsession, self-loathing and self-delusion. He enables you to overlook the coincidences and contrivances and embrace the moral dilemmas at the heart of the story. The characters in Love Letters have made terrible choices: oh, they might have seemed innocent or justifiable or even generous at the time, but they weren’t that at all — and now they’re forced to carry on. And they do so under a cloud of shame and regret. (As Rand imagines it, Singleton’s amnesia is merely a different kind of coping mechanism.) Love Letters is a film about the mistakes we struggle to forget, those we choose to forget and those we’re forced to forget. How much do we have the courage to face — and more than that, to rectify?
Singleton has reverted to her essence — there’s a playfulness, a girlishness about her; Rand’s screenplay — like Massie’s novel — insists that once life is no longer filtered through expectation and experience, we’re free to appreciate it more fully. But as much as Singleton revels in her newfound ability to live in the moment, a darkness creeps over her that she struggles to set aside. She’s forever on her guard: fearful of her memories returning, and what they might reveal — and what that might mean for her relationship with Alan. The film plays with memory throughout. People keep urging Alan to forget his time on the front lines, as if it’s that simple. (His fiancée insists, “The war is over for you. Over and done with. You mustn't look back and get morbid.”) But only alcohol helps him forget, and he’s drunk the night he meets Singleton; when she later references their time together, his mind is a blur. (She has amnesia, but he’s got the bad memory.) And Singleton keeps glimpsing images from her past, but the pieces refuse to fall into place, as if silently, stubbornly defying her.
Dieterle leans into the excesses common to these sorts of romantic melodramas — a rare practice for him. He encourages Jones to indulge in a few fits of hysteria — the sort he would have typically tamed — because he knows they’ll make her battle to regain her peace of mind that much more unsettling. (Jones is chilling in spots, simulating serenity, yet plainly desperate to shield her future from her past.) Whatever unlikely scenario Rand hands him, Dieterle keeps cutting to the heart of the material. When Alan launches into a drunken diatribe against the follies of war, Dieterle starts with his empty glass hitting the floor, then pans up till we reach Alan himself — and finally, pulls back until the entrance to the room becomes a proscenium of sorts, framing Alan as if he were onstage, soliloquizing to an audience of none. (Dieterle stresses that the lines aren’t the point; Alan’s self-imposed isolation is.) But if Dieterle has no patience for Alan’s self-pity, he revels in his romantic nature. Note how he relaxes the tempo when Alan revisits a bedroom he frequented as a child — one his late aunt saw fit to preserve with objects that anchor him to his childhood and anticipate his adulthood — and again when Alan shares that room with Singleton. Dieterle uses Alan’s mementos — and the spell they cast over the pair — to remind us that whatever pain and disillusion Alan and Singleton have endured, they remain that same starry-eyed couple who once found hope and solace pouring out their hearts in prose.
Love Letters marked Dieterle’s first collaboration with cinematographer Lee Garmes — whose dramatic use of chiaroscuro was said to be influenced by the paintings of Rembrandt — and with art director Roland Anderson, DeMille’s favorite, who — as the ’30s gave way to the ’40s — swapped his trademark Art Deco look for the sinuous, flowing style of Art Nouveau. The synergy between the three is powerful. On first glance, the fog-enshrouded farmhouse where Alan and Singleton make their home feels like the cozy English cottage of countless films. Yet on closer inspection, it’s lived in yet strangely closed off: an idyll that seems to exist outside of time itself. The angles and proportions are odd. Diagonal beams and banisters encroach from the corners of the screen; in the garden, tree limbs cut through the country air. When the sun is overhead, it’s as enchanted a cottage as two newlyweds could hope for; as the day darkens, the beams and banisters and limbs close in on the couple — as if the truths they’re hiding from lie in wait, eager to impinge on their happiness. (Each time the postman turns up with news of the outside world, Dieterle captures the long approach of his dark figure — spied through an open door — as if he were the Angel of Death.) There’s no safe haven for Alan and Singleton; the tighter they hold onto their love, the more tenuous it becomes.
Dieterle’s guiding hand is essential throughout, but the climax in particular — when Singleton’s memories come flooding back — is unforgettable. The first few minutes of that scene might be my favorite sequence in any Dieterle film, and on the face of it, it’s no more than standard continuity editing. As Singleton begs her guardian (Gladys Cooper) for answers, Dieterle begins with Jones and Cooper in a two-shot, then as Cooper agrees to open up about the past, catches her over Jones’s shoulder. Just before Cooper reveals a crucial puzzle piece that’s sure to leave Jones shaken, Dieterle reframes the shot: capturing Jones face on, and Cooper in profile. Then as the riddle starts to unravel, Jones rises and makes her way into the living room. The camera pulls back to accommodate the move — then widens even more than it needs to: the opening of the lens not merely reflecting but anticipating the steady return of her memories. Other directors might choose that moment to revert to a close-up, but Dieterle loved to use the camera’s sense of freedom to mirror the characters’ own. He had a gift for putting fluid emotions right onto the screen — often through the way the camera chose to explore its environment. Here, Dieterle doesn’t so much shadow Singleton as guide her through the room — until she grows secure enough to continue the journey unassisted. It’s in Singleton’s shifting relationship with the camera — at first, letting it lead, then drawing it toward her — that we sense her heart finally start to heal. Love Letters is a film about the toll life takes on our spirit, and about the risks we take for love. And it’s about the risks we take for art. Dieterle bares his soul here more than in any other film. While exercising his customary taste and restraint, he proves unafraid to flirt with excess — to bathe the love story in darkness and abandon — and in doing so, he reinvigorates its tiredest tropes. He rushes headlong into uncharted territory, like his characters, and unwittingly redirects his own career.
Buoyed by the critical and box-office triumph of Love Letters (four Oscar nods, including Best Actress), Dieterle chose another romantic melodrama: this one a one-off for Universal. THIS LOVE OF OURS is a story practically designed for Dieterle, in which married couple Merle Oberon and Charles Korvin, separated for a decade after one awful misunderstanding, try to rebuild their lives. Dieterle does wonders for Oberon, who could be hard to read onscreen, and occasionally hard to watch. Aside from a few early scenes in which she flirts merrily with Korvin, her character is a study in repression: repressed anger, repressed grief, repressed affection. It’s rather an ideal role for her; the fact that she’s got so much simmering beneath the surface means she never goes blank, and Dieterle’s insistence on discretion curbs her excesses. (It doesn’t hurt that she’s shot, gorgeously, by her husband Lucien Ballard.) So much of This Love of Ours works that it’s maddening when the screenwriters keep dropping the ball. There are stupefying lapses in logic. But Oberon and Korvin share good chemistry, Claude Rains (as a caricaturist with a keen understanding of the human heart) provides both the requisite wariness and wisdom, and the final sequence is so well-paced and well-structured that you come away strangely satisfied. (The setting is a child’s birthday party, and like so many Dieterle crowd scenes, it simulates spontaneity with almost balletic precision.) In lesser hands, the film could have been a disaster; with Dieterle and his stars giving it their all, it’s surprisingly, compulsively rewatchable.
This Love of Ours — for all that’s charming about it — is a trifle; THE SEARCHING WIND (1946) is a major effort. Lillian Hellman disliked her 1944 Broadway play — a stinging censure of the U.S. policy of appeasement — because she felt it was too overtly political. She reimagined it for the screen — kept maybe 20% of the original — and forged something far superior. We see history unfold through the effect it has on three characters — specifically through the tug-of-war two women engage in over one man. Dieterle gives it the deliberate gloss of a woman’s picture of the mid-’40s, and through that familiar prism, we glimpse not only the rise of fascism, but the unwillingness of so many to denounce it.
The man at the heart of the story, Alexander Hazen (Robert Young), has been entrusted — like his father before him — with a powerful political post, but he’s terrified of his own influence. He keeps misreading situations, or claiming to — you can’t tell which. As diplomat, then ambassador, he watches Mussolini seize power in Italy and the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany — then both countries supply aircraft and ammunition to Franco in Spain — yet he can’t bring himself to condemn it as escalating fascism. He’s full of questions — “what can I do?” and “how could I change anything?” — that he poses mostly to the woman he loves, Cassie Bowman (Sylvia Sidney), but he’s not looking for answers; he’s serving up an excuse for his inaction. He’s fond of pointing out that no one man dictates the law in the United States — because it absolves him of responsibility. The film starts in 1945, as he’s putting old files into storage (as his father-in-law puts it, “preserving his mistakes”). We eventually flash back to 1922 and follow him through the decades, as his charm and assurance dwindle, and his countenance grows careworn. It’s the most complex role Young had essayed — and he does well by it.
Cassie is one of two women that Alex grew up with — the other a publisher’s daughter, Emily Taney (Ann Richards). When we first flash back to 1922, Alex and Cassie have gotten engaged; they’re young and in love — and an unlikely pair. When Mussolini marches on Rome, Cassie begs Alex to send an accurate report back to the States, but he insists he’s uncertain what he’s witnessing: “I think this is a civil war. I can’t take sides.” But she’s quick to counter, “Whenever people talk about not taking sides, they’ve already taken them.” Cassie is unlike Alex in outlook and temperament, and perhaps that’s why she’s so drawn to him. She’s perceptive and insightful — insightful enough to know she has to break off their engagement; the rise of fascism turns her into an eager, ambitious journalist. (She’s an English professor in the play, far removed from the action; she gets a huge upgrade in the film.) She intuitively understands the magnitude of events as they unfold — but as Sidney plays it (shatteringly), Cassie’s insights only serve to make her more easily rattled. Her nerves keep getting the better of her — and the woman Alex rebounds with, Emily, learns to take advantage of that.
Emily understands more of what’s happening in the world than she lets on — but she doesn’t dwell on it; she’s too busy enjoying the company of the power players who pursue her because of her husband‘s position and her family wealth. She finds it easier to maintain and assert control than Cassie, but she’s haunted by loneliness. (Ann Richards never became the star Hal Wallis hoped she’d be, but it’s hard to see how her performances in Love Letters and The Searching Wind could be improved; here she captures the sense of entitlement that people of breeding see as their birthright, all stemming from a fear that — aside from their breeding — they have little to offer.) Emily is privileged and petty and terminally insecure; Cassie is politically astute and socially naïve, and the man she loves lacks the courage of her convictions. The Searching Wind isn’t one of those films about the competitiveness between two women where one is reduced to victimhood or martyrdom. On the contrary, both these women get exactly what they want, each step of the way, but they remain quietly resentful and mistrustful. And vulnerable to each other. And for 24 years, Alex — hungering for Cassie, but yoked to Emily — practices the same sort of appeasement in his personal life that he does professionally.
Producer Hal Wallis lavished money on the film, and Dieterle lets you see every penny. (The cinematography is by Lee Garmes, who’d done Love Letters, and the art direction by Franz Bachelin, who’d attend to most of the Dieterle-Wallis productions to come.) The furnishings become fixtures every bit as important as the actors themselves. Hellman aims her rage at those who sell out humanity by bartering with their souls; she targets them, but sheds little light on them. Dieterle does. Each time Alex and Emily settle into new surroundings — dwarfed and framed by the objets d’art that adorn them — you’re reminded how easy it is for people of privilege to grow inured to the suffering of others. It’s opulence as isolationism.
There’s a striking moment in the first half hour, when the principals are seated at a formal dinner party in 1945. (An oversized crystal chandelier hangs over the table, and behind it, an oil painting shimmers in deep focus.) A radio bulletin interrupts their chatter, announcing the death of Mussolini, and Dieterle fast cuts from reaction shot to reaction shot: from Young (impassive) to Sidney (intense) to Richards (uneasy). In the way Dieterle positions them among the flowers and china and artwork, it’s clear that their lives are fundamentally unaffected by the news — but the looks on their faces and the quick edits tell a different story; they see their world altered in some profound manner. Dieterle not only heightens the paradox at the heart of the material, but by making the announcement momentous in a way we don’t yet understand, he arouses our curiosity, and thereby justifies the giant flashback that follows (something Hellman failed to accomplish onstage). In the decades following his retirement from Hollywood — the period in which his reputation was most decimated — it was popular for authors to minimize Dieterle’s contributions by insisting that he rarely strayed from the printed page. (The author of a book on Juarez goes into lavish detail about every other creative, but when it comes to Dieterle, in the fashion then popular, he limits his contribution to one sentence: “Dieterle followed the script — period.”) That assertion ignores the occasions — as noted above — where he was clearly engaged in improvisation. But more to the point, it looks at the evidence — his commitment to the written word — and draws the wrong conclusion. Dieterle was adamant that one of his roles was to remain true to the script. But one of his great gifts was to clarify and improve that script — in a way that other, more celebrated directors might not have had the technique or the instincts for. In his ability to zero in on the impulse behind a scene and heighten it visually, thereby enhancing the story-telling, he was a screenwriter’s best friend.
The Searching Wind proceeds with such sweep and aplomb, its flaws grow all the more apparent. The brief stopover in Spain feels aimless — it’s the one time you feel Hellman dawdling, and Dieterle can’t figure out how to energize it. Albert Basserman — in a quick but key appearance — feels a little fussily comic, like the magnificent 78-year-old codger came up with a characterization he was proud of and Dieterle didn’t have the heart to correct him. And the choral singing over the opening and closing is a bit much. But none of it matters. The film was one of Dieterle’s greatest even before its theme — the signs of fascism that are overlooked, and why — regained its relevance. In the final scenes (set once more in 1945), having had the patterns of their past paraded before them, Alex and Cassie are forced to accept their incompatibility. He admits he’s always lied to her about his political intentions in order to hold on to her — and she comes to recognize that Alex and Emily are kindred spirits. (If anything, she feels liberated by the long-overdue epiphany.) The Searching Wind surprises you by denying you the happy ending you were expecting. Instead, it decries Alex and Emily’s lack of courage and conviction, then takes pains to shame them in front of their son. It’s hardly a surprise that the film failed at the box office. It was released just a year after the end of World War II. Who wanted to see a movie that told Americans they could — and must — do better?
”By the mid-1940s Dieterle was under Selznick's wing ….. Portrait of Jennie [is] indication of how often the women's picture encourages moderate talent into abandoning caution." — David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)
Nothing about Dieterle’s work suggests caution. (Thomson is confusing caution with restraint.) On the contrary, an examination of even his earliest work in Hollywood reveals how daring he was. (Darryl Zanuck, head of production at Warner Bros. between 1931 and 1933, was initially displeased by Dieterle’s innovations on the set, until he saw how effective they were in the dailies.) And only one of five films he directed in the mid-’40s was produced by Selznick, and only one more came along a few years later; that seems to me a rather liberal interpretation of “under someone’s wing.” Besides, part of the fascination of PORTRAIT OF JENNIE is how Selznick keeps trying to gain the upper hand over Dieterle — as he did over countless others — and how Dieterle refuses to let him.
In Depression-era New York, struggling artist Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) has a chance encounter with an enigmatic schoolgirl, Jennie Appleton. Encouraging him to wait for her until she has “time to grow up,” she scurries off, but inspires him to draw a sketch from memory, tapping into emotions he’d been unable to access. Jennie quickly becomes Eben’s muse, but with a tantalizing twist: each time they meet, she’s aged far beyond the short time he last saw her. He watches her grow from childhood to young adulthood in a matter of months. Who is Jennie Appleton, how can she skip through time so easily — and can Eben paint without her?
Selznick had spent much of the ’40s molding the film career of his fixation (and soon-to-be wife) Jennifer Jones. On their previous collaboration, Duel in the Sun (1946), King Vidor was hired to direct, but Selznick’s obsessive behavior prompted him to quit before filming was completed, and Selznick ran through no less than six replacements, including himself. (He brought in Dieterle to direct a new opening sequence, to better elucidate Jones’s journey, then kept him around for most of the retakes.) Selznick’s ongoing addiction to amphetamines, gambling debts, and impending divorce from wife Irene — compounded by the failure of his subsequent film The Paradine Case — made him even more volatile by the time Portrait of Jennie rolled around. He engaged four writers (among them, Paul Osborn and an uncredited Ben Hecht), but still took on the last of the rewrites himself. He drove away the original composer, Bernard Herrmann (although his replacement, Dimitri Tiomkin, using — at Selznick’s insistence — themes of Claude Debussy, turned out a memorable score); he parted company with his longtime editor and assistant Hal C. Kern, a move he so regretted, he didn’t even credit the two men who replaced him. Yet despite the merry-go-round of creative personnel, no one got behind the camera except Dieterle. No one was better equipped to navigate its unconventional love story (Eben comes to court a young woman he first meets when she’s barely in her teens), and Selznick knew it. And because Dieterle knew that Selznick knew, he felt emboldened to shape and shoot the film as he saw fit. Oh, you can spot the elements that bear Selznick’s stamp: the portentous narration at the top, with its quotes from Euripides and Keats; the early use of surround sound for the lighthouse sequence. Selznick was a showman in a way that Dieterle was not. (His memo to Ben Hecht about the opening narration is classic Selznick: he intended it “to imply that anyone that doesn’t believe [the story that follows] is an ignoramus.”) But the unveiling of the love story — haunting, elliptical — bears Dieterle’s mark at every turn, and the themes he highlights could practically be seen as autobiographical.
Unlike Dieterle’s more recent adaptations, Love Letters and The Searching Wind, Portrait of Jennie remains faithful to its source (Robert Nathan’s 1940 novel of the same title). Only the novel’s theological side is muted. Nathan spends a lot of time ruminating on God’s place in the universe; Dieterle largely ignores such matters. He ties Jennie’s appearances less to a quest for religious clarity than to Eben’s journey toward creative fulfillment. Eben admits at the start to suffering what he calls “a winter of the mind,” defeated and stilled by the world’s indifference to his paintings. Even after he finds his muse, he remains plagued by doubts: “Why should I believe that of all the struggling artists, I’m one who has something worth saying?” The film of Portrait of Jennie is about the creative process: how ephemeral it is, and how torturous. It asks what it takes to make an artist — and in particular, to make a great one. It’s about finding something that inspires you, even if it’s something no one else can see — which might well be a summation of Dieterle’s early years at Warner Bros. And it’s about sifting through the noise and the haze until you arrive at what is true: essentially Dieterle’s entire approach to filmmaking. As the film’s stock has risen dramatically over the last 20 years, Selznick auteurists (yes, even producers can be auteurs now) will ascribe its success to him. But they’re mistaken. Portrait of Jennie is the least likely of Selznick films: an outlier in his oeuvre. (He viewed it as a “modest venture,” one that didn’t require his full attention.) But it’s the essence — and a summation — of Dieterle’s taste, talent and aesthetic.
Dieterle takes Nathan’s blend of romance and fantasy and overlays a veneer of poetic realism common to French noirs of the ‘30s. (It’s a style that came naturally to him. As film historian Richard Koszarski has observed, Dieterle's “reflective, graceful, and thoughtfully low-key [sensibility] often makes him seem more French than Germanic.”) As reimagined by Dieterle and cinematographer Joseph H. August (who had done The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Devil and Daniel Webster), New York City becomes at once a retreat for revelers, where it’s easy to get lost in the crowd, and a hideaway of haunted seclusion — endless stretches of empty streets and solitary paths — where you’re more likely to get lost in your own thoughts, or consumed by someone else’s. Selznick was aghast at how many extras Dieterle insisted on for a backdrop of skaters in Central Park, but as you watch, you feel like you’re seeing the world as Eben does: as a canvas waiting to be painted (here, perhaps, a piece in the style of Agnes Tait or Leon Kroll). Everything is filtered through Eben’s eyes. August filmed through special filters that replicated the texture of oil paintings, using lenses from his silent film days; shots look like they’ve been pulled straight from a canvas. (He died of a heart attack before filming was completed — he was replaced by an uncredited Lee Garmes — but was posthumously nominated for an Oscar. The film took home the trophy for Special Effects.) Dieterle and August’s sleight-of-hand leaves you questioning what is real and what is “merely” illusion. When Jennie appears to Eben, is she an anomaly — a crack in the fabric of time — or is he being exposed to a deeper truth than most of us are allowed? Is the universe, in fact, doing for Eben what artists do for their audiences: allowing them to see the world in a way they hadn’t readily understood?
Jones is radiant, pulling off the rapid aging without coyness or self-consciousness; Cotten is riveting as a man struggling to connect with his passions. There are strong supporting turns from veteran Cecil Kellaway and legend Lillian Gish, as well as early screen appearances by Broadway regulars David Wayne, Albert Sharpe and Maude Simmons, all three appearing onstage at the time in Finian’s Rainbow. (Simmons’ character has only one scene: backstory she provides when Eben grows determined to verify Jennie’s origins. But she’s so grateful for the opportunity to speak about the past — and so wistful when it comes to recalling a most unfortunate episode — that you quite forget she exists only to bridge gaps in the story-telling. No one could infuse exposition with emotion like Dieterle.) But perhaps no one is more luminous than Ethel Barrymore, as an art dealer who becomes Eben’s confidante; her performance so lingers in the mind that generations of admirers have created fan-fiction about her character, and where she fits in the narrative. Portrait of Jennie becomes a bit of a master class — as The Hunchback of Notre Dame had been — in showcasing actors of varying backgrounds, disciplines and levels of expertise, while gently imposing a consistent style. There is very little deadwood in any Dieterle film; he took care of his performers, down to the tiniest bit parts. He wasn’t prone to giving line readings like Cukor, or to achieving effects through mental manipulation like Hitchcock. He simply had a knack for knowing and explaining what he wanted — and no doubt his experiences as a stage and screen actor provided the insights he needed to communicate effectively. And for all the care he took in his compositions, he never let the framing of a shot upstage an artist — his actor’s training wouldn’t allow it.
I suspect most fans of Portrait of Jennie would take exception to Thomson labeling it a “women’s picture” — in part because that downplays its ambitions. But it’s also inaccurate because Portrait of Jennie is more his movie than hers. Oh, Jennie Appleton is unquestionably a great part for Jones, but as Dieterle shapes the film, Cotten has the pivotal role. (Selznick probably never saw that one coming.) Despite Jennie appearing and disappearing from Eben’s life, she’s the constant; he’s the variable. Her story is predetermined; his is still being written. Portrait of Jennie isn’t just a love story, or a tale of two worlds colliding. It’s a study of a pained and humbling spiritual journey; Eben Adams is as much a work in progress as the portrait of Jennie itself. Jennie encourages Eben to forget the limitations of time and space (and not merely to forget them, but to scale them), then challenges him to put that new awareness to good use. That’s what sets Portrait of Jennie apart from other supernatural romances, like the previous year’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir — and it’s why audiences have grown so protective of the film; it speaks to their power to harness their own potential. Notably, although Dieterle is profoundly secure in his storytelling, he’s happy to leave elements open to interpretation; he trusts viewers to decipher them according to their own backgrounds and biases. (Luis Buñuel, the father of cinematic surrealism, called Portrait of Jennie his favorite film, both for the “wonderful world” Dieterle brought to life and for the details he shrewdly left unexplained.) By letting his convictions about his craft serve as both creative and thematic guide, Dieterle fashions a film about the power of love to transform art, and the power of art to transcend love. It’s his most intimate and revealing work.
Dieterle completed his run of fifteen superlative films (culminating in five splendid romantic melodramas) with THE ACCUSED, a feminist response to the misogyny that overran the film industry in the 1940’s. The premise is what we now consider noir. Loretta Young’s psychology professor, Wilma Tuttle, is sexually assaulted by a student; in defending herself, she accidentally kills him. And then like so many noir protagonists, she’s left having to cover up her crime — and not merely cover it up, but lend her expertise to the investigation. But here’s the twist: before he died, her student penned a profile of his professor that’s likely to expose her: the sexually frustrated female of many a Forties flick (e.g., Young’s own The Doctor Takes a Wife), who hides her fear of intimacy behind glasses she doesn’t need. Tuttle realizes that to avoid detection, she’ll need to forge a more outgoing persona, and though it starts out as a ruse, she soon grows comfortable in her own skin. She discovers she enjoys this new game of cat and mouse, toying with witnesses who don’t recognize her because she’s figuratively and literally let down her hair. In time she reclaims the upper hand that women on screen had routinely enjoyed a decade earlier.
The Accused is eager to expose how ’40s films have pigeon-holed women, and fittingly, screenwriter Ketti Frings lays the blame squarely at the feet of men. (The truck driver who picks up Tuttle on the side of the road after her assault sizes her up and senses she’s the victim of a date gone wrong — and holds her responsible.) The film’s two male leads — one of whom (Robert Cummings) ultimately wins her — ogle and leer at Tuttle as if it’s something women should not only be used to, but enjoy; when she dresses up for a dinner date, Cummings notes approvingly that her “brains don’t show.” It’s hard enough in this environment for a woman to get by. A woman in academia? She hasn’t got a chance. Small wonder that the professor has receded into a repressed version of herself; it’s an act of self-preservation. Frings’ screenplay not only explains why so many post-war women on screen have lost their sense of liberation, but makes it clear that no men are going to swoop in and save them; they’ll have to save themselves. (Although Frings receives the sole script credit, at least six other writers at Paramount had a hand in it, but it never feels like a hodgepodge; the touchups and rewrites result in energy, bite and an abundance of good lines.)
Like Maximilian in Juarez, like Singleton in Love Letters, like Eben in Portrait of Jennie, Professor Wilma Tuttle is the kind of restlessly conflicted character that Dieterle had an affinity for exploring. Tuttle’s student tags her as “cyclothymic” — what we’d refer to today as a mild form of bipolar disorder — and although it’s the student’s observation, and not Frings’, both Young and Dieterle seize upon it. (The two hadn’t worked together since Grand Slam and The Devil’s in Love in 1933; the film makes for an auspicious reunion.) Young fluctuates between periods of depression and intervals of extraversion, punctuated by fits of outrage, and Dieterle captures every sudden shift of mood, as she monitors, psychoanalyzes and adjusts her own behavior. (He seems to have a mirror forever positioned nearby, exposing her: watching her come undone or fight to regroup.) Together, they create a layered look at a quick-witted academic thwarted not only by a savvy DA, but by convictions that cloud her reasoning and insecurities that offset her intelligence. It’s an extremely nuanced portrait for this sort of dark melodrama — and easily one of Young’s finest performances. (The Accused — adored by critics and audiences in 1949 — became a “late late show” staple in the ’50s before fading into obscurity. Happily it’s enjoyed a renaissance since its Blu-ray release in 2021.)
The Accused marks the end of an extraordinarily fertile period in Dieterle’s career: in the fifteen films from Blockade (1938) to The Accused (1949), he basks in an uncommon mastery and mash-up of genres. The nine films that follow are more hit or miss; none are awful, but only a handful are among Dieterle’s best. Most of the time Dieterle is giving his all, weighed down by a lackluster script or indifferent performances. It’s hard to imagine that the lessening quality of his offers — and the few films in which he seems more distracted than engaged — weren’t a result of his being singled out as a “premature anti-fascist” by the House Un-American Activities Committee. (In late 1952, prior to an overseas shoot in Ceylon, his passport was held up for three months by the State Department pending “investigation.” Who was going to hire him — or entrust him with an A-list film — after that?)
The film that followed The Accused, ROPE OF SAND, is a movie many like more than me. (It got great notices and did strong business in 1949.) The screenplay by Walter Doniger wonders which is more effective: mental manipulation or physical torture — and the answer is often sadistic fun, with Paul Henreid and Claude Rains competing for scenery-chewing honors. Dieterle and cinematographer Charles Lang (abetted by art director Franz Bachelin) make the most of the South African desert setting — but then, Dieterle’s hand has rarely been more cunning or his camera more assured, whether it’s monitoring the outcome of a blackball box vote or ratcheting up the tension during a poker game, whether it’s dishing out entertainment and exposition during a restaurant scene or unleashing his leads in a climactic fistfight where the wind-blown sand proves the ultimate victor. It’s the sort of Dieterle film — and there are quite a few — where it’s easy on rewatch to disengage from the details of the plot and just focus on the expressiveness of the staging and shooting. (You can grow mesmerized here analyzing whom he’s catching in a low-angle shot and whom in a high, and why.)
But there’s a hollowness at the film’s core. Burt Lancaster (as a hunting guide who’s come to reclaim the diamond lode he stumbled upon two years earlier) had no desire to do the film and, by his own admission, phoned it in — and it shows. He decides to lead with his character’s obsession, and that one trait pretty much precludes all others — although a little of the hurt and hunger that he had conveyed so well earlier that year in Criss Cross would’ve gone a long way. It’s a curious performance: forceful, as ever, but also distant and blank. As for the actress hired to make her Hollywood screen debut opposite him — Wallis discovery Corinne Calvet — her instincts are sound, but her technique is vague and clumsy. And you don’t get a first-rate film when you take an actress who is still learning to ply her trade and put her opposite an actor refusing to ply his. Not that viewers minded. Thomas M. Pryor, Bosley Crowther’s second stringer, reviewed for the Times (as T.M.P.: Crowther refused to let his fill-ins be credited by anything more than their initials) and raved, giving Dieterle his most reverential notice there since the halcyon days of Mordaunt Hall and Frank Nugent. (Crowther must have been apoplectic. Pryor had already praised The Accused as “a super-duper psychological job.”) Pryor credited the “resourceful direction” for turning “an ordinary story of revenge and lust for riches into a sizzling action picture. [Mr. Dieterle] has injected an extra full measure of excitement and tension into [the] screenplay by skillfully using the camera to create a suspenseful atmosphere of foreboding and by keeping the players snapping and snarling at each other like savage beasts. Mr. Dieterle's steady, driving directorial pace seldom lags over the long course of this highly romanticized adventure tale, which grows progressively volatile for more than 90 minutes.” Pryor heralded it as “a robust exercise in muscular cinematic gymnastics.” Audiences agreed.
PAID IN FULL is the oddest of the Wallis-Dieterle collaborations, mostly because of the concessions made to adapt it to the screen. It’s based on a true story published in Reader’s Digest, about two sisters cautioned that childbirth will be risky, and the sacrifice one makes for the other. There’s no way a frank discussion of women’s health was going to make it past the Hays Office, so writers Charles Schnee and Robert Blees had to tread delicately — plus they had to assemble a lot of cumbersome apparatus to ensure that the baby born at the end was conceived in wedlock. Given the censorship challenges, they turned out a credible script; really all that’s missing are some decent punchlines for sidekick Eve Arden. And Dieterle, instead of opting for melodrama, chooses a slice-of-life approach that suits the three leads: sisters Lizabeth Scott and Diana Lynn, and the man caught between them, Robert Cummings. Scott is best remembered as a femme fatale, but she was far superior at this sort of role: a decent woman who lacks the self-awareness to understand the damage she’s doing. She was rarely more appealing or expressive than she is here — which is something you can’t say about her in her next film for Dieterle and Wallis, DARK CITY. Here Charlton Heston is a veteran who — unable to shake his wartime disillusions — has gotten mired in the easy corruption of New York City. Closed off to possibilities, he’s come to treat everyone with the same derision he once reserved for himself — and that includes the lounge singer who’s carrying a torch for him (Scott). As Dieterle shoots it, a feeling of fatalism pervades the film: the canted angles and tight close-ups create a world that seems to be closing in on its characters. He amplifies everything that’s good about the screenplay. What he can’t salvage, uncommonly, is the love story. Scott is clingy to the point of being pitiful; Heston is uncaring to the point of being cruel. As much as you’d like to place all the blame on the scenarists, Dieterle doesn’t help matters. If only Heston threw Scott an appreciative smile now and then, if only Scott brushed off one of his rebuffs with a healthy laugh, you might start to envision and accept them as a couple. But those moments never come; it’s like Dieterle’s forgotten everything he knew about forging a viable screen romance, even when the lines are lacking. (For a while, you think Heston is going to settle down with war widow Viveca Lindfors, a misdirect that seems wholly unintentional.) If you can overlook the ineffectiveness of the love story, Dieterle’s direction sees you through — but what an odd thing to have to overlook in a Dieterle film.
The 1951 Western RED MOUNTAIN is a handsome Technicolor production, set in the waning days of the Civil War, and it’s hard to see how the location shooting or the action sequences could be improved. It starts with a whirlwind of commotion, beautifully paced and staged: a murder, a manhunt, a lynching aborted by a sharp-shooting Alan Ladd. Ladd learns more about the man he saved (Arthur Kennedy) and his partner (Lizabeth Scott again), a pair of prospectors who’ve stumbled onto a goldmine. Then Kennedy gets injured, the three of them are trapped in a mountain cave — and the film sits in one place (literally and figuratively) for an eternity. There’s a sound story at Red Mountain’s core — of a hardened soldier forced to reassess his fallacies about war and his delusions about heroes — but the script short-changes things like character consistency and growth, and the epiphanies are so underwhelming, they might as well be happening offscreen. And as in Dark City, the romantic element fails to convince. Scott’s visible pining for Ladd, even though Kennedy’s life is on the line, makes her seem incredibly fickle — but then, Ladd has barely gotten to know Scott and he’s already pulling her in for a kiss. Motivations are sketchy at best. Saddled with such a static script, neither Dieterle nor Ladd seems able to hit his usual (high) marks — and their sole collaboration should have been a slam dunk; the story centers around a staple of post-war cinema, one they were both versed in: the morally bankrupt antihero who grows eager to reclaim his soul. John Meredyth Lucas, one of the credited writers, had also done Dark City. They were his first two screen credits, and Wallis clearly felt he was cultivating a budding new talent. It may be that Lucas was merely Wallis’s rewrite guy, and the bulk of the blame goes to Lucas’s various collaborators — but that said, both films suffer from the same issue: a promising premise undermined by a weak follow-through. And that’s true of Lucas’s third film as well, PEKING EXPRESS.
During the first 30 minutes of Peking Express (set on board a train bound from Shanghai), Dieterle, Lang and art directors Franz Bachelin and Hal Pereira forge scenes of claustrophobic beauty and intrigue. Then the passengers disembark, the action resumes at the drab headquarters of a black-market operation, and the dialogue dissolves into a desert of talk. It’s Paramount’s second (loose) remake of the 1932 classic Shanghai Express, and it gets knocked for not living up to the original — but the comparisons miss the point; Peking Express is a totally different beast: an exposé of the tensions simmering in the newly-emerged People’s Republic of China. To Dieterle’s credit, he keeps the film free of flag-waving, granting even the most odious and mercenary characters an unusual level of dignity. (As film historian Eddy Von Mueller notes in the Blu-ray commentary, the film is “almost nuanced” in comparison to other Red Scare propaganda pieces of its day.) Dieterle, Lang and composer Dimitri Tiomkin try to bring some variety and tension to the political discourse that consumes the middle third of the film, and they’re largely successful, but there’s nothing they can do when the writers choose to close with a slapdash shootout aboard a moving train — the sort that wouldn’t have been out of place in an Errol Flynn Western. (In the Flynn film, the bad guys would’ve been on horseback rather than crowded into a jeep, and the train would’ve been on fire, but it’s the same scene.) At that point, the creative team pretty much throw up their hands and head home. The film features a large, multicultural cast, and as ever, Dieterle takes good care of his actors — with one curious exception: star Joseph Cotten falters near the end. He seems in his element as a UN doctor stationed in China, committed to saving patients regardless of political affiliation — but when he’s forced to rescue the passengers of a hijacked train by grabbing a gun and firing off shots with uncanny accuracy, it feels like a stretch. He plays a confident doctor who becomes a reluctant warrior — but one of the oddities of cinema is that it probably would’ve worked better the other way around: with an actor who didn’t quite convince as a man of medicine, but came into his own as an action hero. It might’ve given the final reel the lift it so badly needed. (Co-star Corinne Calvet, on the other hand, has improved remarkably since Rope of Sand; she’s learned to use her half-profile and crinkle her smile to good advantage, and she takes a great slap near the end. Her face is framed so provocatively by her back-combed victory curls, she pulls focus every time she appears.)
But if Cotten fails to convince in Peking Express, he’s magnificent opposite Joan Fontaine in SEPTEMBER AFFAIR: Dieterle’s last great exploration of the human heart. September Affair challenges the age-old belief that “true love” makes everything right. It’s about the lies we tell ourselves to avoid facing our responsibilities, and the selfish behavior we struggle to rationalize. Joan Fontaine is concert pianist Manina Stewart; Joseph Cotten is married businessman David Lawrence. They meet at an airport in Italy when their flight to the U.S. is delayed, and decide to explore some of the sights they haven’t had a chance to see. When they subsequently miss their flight, they decide to stay on a few more days — and when they learn that their plane went down in a crash, and their names are listed among the fatalities, they have a singular decision to make. Do they return to the U.S. to face the lives they loathe, or do they stay in Italy and start a new life together?
The film needs to convince you that their decision to stay on — to let friends and family believe they’re dead — is just as defensible as they convince themselves it is. And it does; it seduces you just as neatly as it does them. There are breathtaking shots of Italy in the early ’50s — scenic views that no sane person would ever want to leave — but the film doesn’t need them. It all comes down to one early scene in a café, in which the two of them — long before they enter into any kind of romance — are intrigued by their ability to speak so candidly to a stranger. Half a world away from the admiring fans who’ve denied her any sense of privacy, Manina is thrilled to have the attention of just one interested party. And David — whose face radiates equal parts resilience and pain — is delighted to have someone so impressive and attractive seeking his attention. The restaurant where they’re sipping Chianti has a stack of American albums, and Manina chooses to play Walter Huston’s 1944 recording of “September Song.” In one of the most striking sequences Dieterle ever committed to film, they listen to the song in its entirety, in silence. Manina is seated at a table, occasionally nodding her head — struck by both its musical beauty (which she understands so readily) and the poignancy and aptness of the lyric; David, standing by the victrola, never takes his eyes off her. Something magical happens in those few minutes: something unspoken and not yet readily understood. But when it comes time to say goodbye to their old lives, you grasp from that one scene alone what it is they’ve been lacking and what they think they’re looking for. It’s classic Dieterle. Every look, every gesture is underscored with precision, but done so delicately, you’re unaware of the hand of the director guiding you along, steering your responses. Dieterle could touch and move your heart without manipulation.
In his 1972 interview with Tom Flinn, Dieterle analyzed what he considered one of his weaknesses: “If I didn’t have my script, I was helpless.” If he was forced to start shooting with incomplete pages, he couldn’t just put his imprint on a scene and be done with it. He needed to understand the arc, the motivations, the endpoint: “A film should have an overall conception. If I don’t have an ending, how can I motivate the beginning? What does it mean? Where does it lead to?” But in discussing one of his perceived failings, he revealed one of his greatest strengths: his insistence on imbuing each film with a sense of purpose — one that, on occasion, eluded even the screenwriters themselves. In all but a few Dieterle films, when you get to the end, you understand how and why you arrived there. The trip made sense; even if the script didn’t serve up the detail you desired, Dieterle did. He knew how to guide you comfortably to your destination. And so it is with September Affair. Thanks to Dieterle, Manina and David’s late-stage decision to return to their former lives doesn’t feel arbitrary, or dictated by the demands of the Hays Office. It seems to spring from character, from a shared acceptance that a move that seemed so well-considered was, in fact, more than a little rash — and perhaps shortsighted and selfish. Their honeymoon doesn’t last long; we see it coming before they do. Early on, Manina describes David as someone who needs to take a step back to get a better look at himself — as one would a painting. Dieterle affords us the same opportunity; he allows us an overview that the leads themselves lack. (The villa they rent seems huge at first, but we watch it grow restrictive over time. Their luggage went down with the plane, but their baggage is crowding them out.) One is running out of fear, the other out of frustration. If only Manina and David were a little stronger, they would’ve made a different decision. And as Dieterle directs it, September Affair — a peek into a possible future posing as a love story — is about making them stronger.
September Affair marked the first time Hollywood stars had filmed on location in Italy — but Dieterle was no stranger to the region. In the spring of 1949, he had received an offer to direct a film on Salina Island, just north of Sicily. Filmmaker Roberto Rossellini had recently discarded his mistress Anna Magnani for his newest muse Ingrid Bergman; while Rossellini readied a film with Bergman on the island of Stromboli, a defiant Magnani set up shop with a different production company a mere 40 miles away, commissioned a script — and invited Dieterle to direct. Rising to the challenge, Dieterle wed Hollywood melodrama to Italian neorealism — and Magnani rewarded him with one of her greatest performances as Maddalena, a Naples prostitute forced by authorities to return to her home island of VULCANO. Although Dieterle later informed The New York Times that conditions “could hardly have been more primitive ….. except for the mechanical equipment we took with us, we had to construct everything we needed with our own hands,” he proved as much a pioneer as ever — in this case, helping develop a new and improved process for underwater filming. In fact, Vulcano is another film — like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Portrait of Jennie — where you sense Dieterle putting to use the lessons of a lifetime. Early on, he forges an extended, wordless sequence from the two means of livelihood — pumice-stone mining and tuna fishing — available to those on the island, setting the hardship and poverty of the people against backdrops of inviolate beauty (the haunting score is by Enzo Masetti); the climactic scene — Maddalena’s act of desperation to save sister Geraldine Brooks from repeating her own mistakes — is achieved without dialogue as well, and it’s perhaps the most harrowing of Magnani’s career. (Dieterle’s skill at spotlighting stars was undiminished.) Separate versions were shot for the Italian and English markets. Although I favor the former for its uncompromising tone, the version approved for U.S. release — three years later — has its own rewards, providing Brooks with the happy ending that’s only been hinted at, as she and her young suitor sail into the Aeolian sunset. Vulcano doesn’t fall under the heading of “Hollywood films,” so its inclusion here is a bit of a stretch, but coming so soon after the crest of Dieterle’s career — and featuring such a commanding star turn — it’s too good to overlook.
As noted, the years 1949 through 1951 were full of distractions and disappointments. But two films in 1952 — both with William Holden — got Dieterle defiantly back on track. Since the mid-’30s, studios had been addicted to films about horse racing. The Marx Brothers spent A Day at the Races, while Betty Grable witnessed The Day the Bookies Wept. Joel McCrea gave the setting a screwball twist in He Married His Wife, while Ava Gardner gave her career a boost when She Went to the Races. Poverty Row practically pitched a tent at the track (Heart of Virginia, Pride of Maryland, Blue Grass of Kentucky). Oh, there was the occasional winner (National Velvet) and some solid contenders (The Story of Seabiscuit, My Brother Talks to Horses), but only one film depicted life at a racecourse with a measure of realism: BOOTS MALONE.
It’s not another film that basks in the beauty and majesty of horses: to the racetrack professionals, they’re a means to an end. (Holden advises a newcomer, “A race horse is a dumb brute. The intelligence has been bred out of him. All he respects is your strength.”) Holden is an agent whose career died when his jockey did, but he continues to haunt the track. When a teenage kid wanders in with wide-eyed notions about racing (he won medals for horsemanship at the academy he’s run away from, and carries a wad of hundred-dollar bills in his pocket), Boots sizes him up as an easy mark and offers to train him. The film takes pains not to go soft; this is a clearheaded look at the cutthroat methods you have to employ to get along and get ahead. (“There’s no such thing as loyalty,” Boots cautions his young charge: “Not at the racetrack.”) The script from producer Milton Holmes exposes the hidden hustles and swindles (which Boots makes use of to get his hands on a horse) that are very much part of life at the track, then zeroes in on the coaching of the young kid, exploring the details with which a jockey needs to be properly schooled: how to sit on the horse in the starting gate, how to switch hands with the whip. Holmes was himself a racing enthusiast — and it shows.
The film has the penny-plain look of a lot of mid-century Columbia films, but Dieterle — working with cinematographer Charles Lawton Jr. and art director Cary Odell (the studio’s best) — uses that to his advantage, giving the movie a grittier, grainier look than you’re used to seeing from him. It lends the film an air of authenticity. Careful not to glamorize the setting or sentimentalize the proceedings, he goes for only one modest — but strategically placed — effect. Although Boots has been treating his new charge like a mere meal ticket for most of the film, something changes when the boy has to register for an upcoming race and — unwilling to provide his own last name — uses Boots’. That night, while everyone sleeps in the stable where they’ve been training for months, Boots sits restless. Something has stirred him — something he didn’t see coming. The film’s bright visual surface gives way to a scene awash in shadow, and we fasten on Boots’ face, his eyes glistening with unfallen tears, his heart fairly bursting with pain and longing. He senses it, then recovers — reinstating the chip on his shoulder that Holden wore so well. (Everyone sees through his cynicism, but no one calls him on it. They all understand it’s his way of speaking from the heart.) It’s a brief moment, but an indelible one. Dieterle lets the character lower his guard just long enough to reveal how much he has riding on the upcoming race. He raises the stakes in a matter of seconds.
Boots Malone is a Dieterle pic I highly enjoy, even though I don’t see as much of Dieterle in it as in most of his classic films. (Dieterle apparently did. Late in his Hollywood career, he listed it as one of five films on which he “enjoyed the pleasure of pure creative expression.”) His next film — his last great one — is Dieterle through and through. In the late ’40s, the federal government became determined to combat the growing influence of organized crime, and so the five-member Kefauver Committee was formed to investigate the issue. The televised hearings in early 1951 were seen by an estimated 30 million Americans; even children were let home early from school to watch. It was inevitable that Hollywood would seek to ape the hearings and their findings, and over the next five years, nearly two dozen films resulted — the best of these being THE TURNING POINT.
Here, special prosecutor John Conroy (Edmond O’Brien, in one of his best screen performances) returns to his Midwestern hometown to head up an anti-crime commission. His primary goal: mob boss, Neil Eichelberger (Ed Begley), who hides his criminal activities behind a legitimate trucking business. John is accompanied by his assistant and girlfriend Amanda (Alexis Smith, in a performance as good as anything she’d done in a decade), a socialite with a social conscience, and challenged and prodded by his boyhood pal Jerry McKibbon (Holden), a newspaper man who knows all the angles and wonders if his friend has what it takes to take out the mob. There’s a “slow and steady wins the race” aspect to The Turning Point that, on paper, sounds conventional, but that turns out to be subversive. The one who prides himself on being a cynic proves so naïve he gets a friend killed; the one derided as an innocent does his job in such a plainspoken, thorough and honest manner, he gets results. And the mob boss who thinks he’s in control — who’s convinced he’s untouchable — is the first to crack.
Dieterle maintains a tight grip, with admirable aid from cinematographer Lionel Lindon. There’s an impressive schizophrenic aspect to The Turning Point that has less to do with the scriptwriters and more to do with Dieterle and Lindon. In the first half, when Conroy is controlling the narrative, the film plays as a standard crime drama — albeit a superbly acted and directed one — where the good guys and bad guys are clearly defined, the pacing is steady and the mood hopeful. But once Eichelberger appears before the committee, his hands start to shake, his ears begin to burn, and he falls pray to paranoia. He realizes he needs to take deadly steps to cover up information that might come to light, and as the others — not just his underlings, but his pursuers — get caught up in his panic, Dieterle and Lindon adjust the look to reflect the desperation on display. Shadows engulf the screen, the angles grow decidedly Dutch — and what was “merely” a crime drama becomes a noir: a noir in which characters stranded in morally gray areas wrestle with issues of obsession, alienation, duplicity and despair. The visual nightmares begin with the torching of an apartment complex that leaves blackened corpses in the street and end with a hired assassin stalking his prey from the catwalk of a boxing arena (a decade before Lindon’s classic catwalk climax in The Manchurian Candidate) — and in between are clandestine meetings in narrow coffee shops and chases up spiral staircases and down darkened hallways. It’s as if the crime boss’s declining mental state induces the noir elements, affirming that noir is — more than anything — a state of mind.
The Turning Point turned a tidy profit for Paramount (and proved the studio’s biggest sleeper of the decade in Australia). And then it was really the end. Dieterle made only four more films before returning to Germany; assignments were proving nearly impossible to come by, and watching former colleagues disavow him was taking its toll. SALOME (1953) is in some ways the oddest of his final films: the one Dieterle might have saved, but didn’t. Harry Cohn greenlighted it to reignite Rita Hayworth’s career — despite her disinterest — knowing she was a decade too old for the title role. Costar Charles Laughton (as her stepfather, King Herod) was incensed by Cohn’s frequent interference, and costar Stewart Granger (as her love interest, Claudius) was put off by Laughton’s frequent upstaging. And the script cobbled together by Hollywood mainstay Jesse Lasky Jr. and relative newcomer Harry Kleiner — despite its clever efforts to reconcile the two versions of Salome referenced in the Bible — barely rose above the pedestrian. Dieterle was admittedly working against formidable odds. But that doesn’t explain how he let British stage star and Hollywood newcomer Alan Badel give such a maniacal performance as John the Baptist. (He makes the gift of prophecy look like a wide-eyed parlor trick.) It doesn’t explain why the color schemes that Dieterle had micromanaged with great success on Kismet seem arbitrary, or why the second-unit team captures a sense of unease that eludes the film as a whole. There’s a scene midway through where Salome interrogates Claudius about John the Baptist, during which Dieterle uses Salome’s antagonism — and Claudius’s deference — to strengthen their bond. On paper, it's dry and factual, but Dieterle seizes upon it to solidify the characters’ chemistry. It’s the sort of thing he did better than just about any of his contemporaries — but it’s one of the few spots where you see what he’s capable of.
Salome has long been characterized as “camp,” but that designation does a disservice to Laughton’s performance. Playing a king consumed by fear, Laughton seems at first all twitches and affectations, but you come to realize the actor is armed with a plan; when Salome dances for him, all the mincing mannerisms that had defined him fall away. Being bewitched by his stepdaughter fills him with renewed vigor; his lust sets him free. (If you’re looking for camp, Laughton gave a hammier performance in The Big Clock.) The actor is in command of his overriding arc; it’s the modulations that are missing. We watch as Laughton and Judith Anderson (as Queen Herodias) engage in an increasingly strained relationship, but we rarely get a glimpse of the desire that once made their pairing seem inescapable, or the despair that it’s vanished. Nuance — Dieterle’s strong suit — is in short supply. We see Salome’s protectiveness towards her mother turn to revulsion — but the loss of that crucial link to her past doesn’t seem to hit Hayworth very hard. Dieterle’s compositions are as elegant as ever, but characters seem disengaged — and so does he. At one point during Hayworth’s famous “dance of the seven veils,” Dieterle cuts to soldiers in the palace plotting an escape, or preventing an escape, or searching for John the Baptist. It’s hard to know what they’re doing. It’s a random action scene inserted so we know “something’s afoot”: the sort of empty ploy that’s so beneath Dieterle that it prompts a more visceral response than anything else in the film. Salome isn’t a low point for biblical epics; hell, it’s not even in the bottom half. But it’s a strange low for Dieterle, his most impassive work in decades; he had embraced (and salvaged) so many less promising properties, it’s hard to say why he held this one at arm’s length. The film was a hit nonetheless (for several years, Cohn proposed reuniting Dieterle and Hayworth on a biblical epic about the life of Joseph); a billboard campaign featuring a scantily-clad Hayworth — plus the cheeky caption, “Your eyes will see the glory” — no doubt helped draw customers to their seats.
Dieterle’s next film, Paramount’s ELEPHANT WALK (1954), proved he still had what it took to tell a good story. Sadly, on Elephant Walk, the best stories occurred off camera, or were consigned to the cutting room floor. In this adaptation of Robert Standish’s 1948 novel, two-time Oscar winner Vivien Leigh was cast as Ruth Wiley, an English bride who takes up residence with her husband John (Peter Finch) on his tea plantation in Ceylon. The studio had high hopes for the film, and sprang for four weeks of location shooting in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), their trailers promising “a [story] so exciting that Paramount went halfway around the world to film it.” Leigh, born in Darjeeling, was thrilled to be returning to a region she recognized from her youth, and enthused to the press about her new role. But once on the set, the actress — battling bipolar disorder — proved increasingly erratic: disrupting shooting and creating turmoil behind the scenes. On the flight home, she grew convinced that the wing was on fire and tried to jump out of the plane; with six weeks of studio shooting about to commence, she suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be institutionalized. Elizabeth Taylor was borrowed from MGM to assume the role.
The AFI Catalog insists that “because the Ceylon footage featured Leigh only in long, establishing shots, most of [it] was retained in the final film.” That’s untrue. A wily Dieterle, anticipating that Leigh might have to be replaced, had grabbed a handful of shots of her at a distance, or from behind, or hidden by a hat or scarf — but that’s it. Dozens of scenes had to be discarded, revised and inserted into the new shooting schedule — and too often they were diminished in the process. A friendly snake that charms Ruth en route to her new home — lulling her into a false sense of security — was scuttled in favor of a generic roadside picnic. A Buddhist temple where Ruth finds herself tempted to stray with John‘s best friend (second-billed Dana Andrews) appeared only as rear projection footage, becoming a far less persuasive aphrodisiac. (Throughout the final cut, Ruth keeps spying things that arouse her curiosity, but can’t manage to enter the frame.) Taylor eased into the role with a minimum of fuss, but the cornerstone of the film — the sense of Ruth interacting with a new environment: one that enchants, puzzles, terrifies and sustains her — disappeared along the way. A story that rises and falls on the relationship between a woman and a way of life that is literally foreign to her was hobbled by the dearth of location footage.
The loss of Leigh hampered the film in another way. Although Taylor turns in a capable performance, her style of acting isn’t suited to the shorthand nature of the script. John Lee Mahin’s screenplay — perhaps because so much material was jettisoned overseas, but probably because he knew that Leigh’s features were so expressive — is noticeably underwritten. Ruth and John’s squabbles peter out just as they’re getting started, and their truces are treated like afterthoughts. Mahin isn’t all that interested in charting the state of the marriage; he’s interested in Ruth’s state of mind, and trusts Leigh to elucidate. But that leaves Taylor — who was not nearly as experienced at conveying a character’s inner life — at a disadvantage. She’s at her best when Mahin allows her to assert her authority, but you rarely glimpse the fragility that might strand Ruth in an abusive marriage, or prompt her to mislead a male friend to whom she has no intention of succumbing. And when she informs that friend, “I love John, I want to make our marriage last,” you’re taken aback; you had no idea her feelings for her husband still ran that deep. From what you’ve seen, the two have hardly shared a kind word since leaving England. (It’s not hard to imagine that Leigh and Finch would have enjoyed greater chemistry; they’d been having an affair for years.)
The novel takes place at the onset of World War I; Mahin reset it in the present day — but the lack of a wartime backdrop robbed the story of its urgency. And the censors didn’t help matters. In the novel, when Ruth turns to her husband’s friend for comfort, they consummate their relationship and conceive a child. Onscreen, they engage in nothing more than a one-sided flirtation. Because she never strays, because he never deserts her, neither undergoes much of a journey; they come off as rather static characters. There’s nothing Dieterle could do about the bowdlerization of the script — nor the loss of so much location footage — except to press on and forge as atmospheric a studio-bound production as he could. And indeed, working with the reliable Hal Pereira and with cinematographer Loyal Griggs (fresh off an Oscar win for Shane), he achieves a plantation home that’s at once lavish, mystical and defiantly dangerous. And to Taylor’s very great credit, whenever she rushes from room to room, coming to terms with the complexities of her new life — interrupting the late-night antics of her husband and his fellow planters; sneaking off to explore the locked room that serves as a memorial to her late father-in-law; and most memorably, fleeing a tight hallway when stampeding elephants threaten to invade her home — she and Dieterle attain an enviable level of urgency. But Elephant Walk couldn’t get by entirely on interior shots, and pretty much every time Taylor steps out into the California sunshine, a visual and emotional blandness sets in. The film — like Salome, a box-office hit — remains an entertaining watch, and it’s far better than Paramount’s similar The Naked Jungle (with Eleanor Parker joining husband Charlton Heston on his cocoa plantation, only for them to be attacked by army ants), released barely a month earlier. But the elements lost along the way result in a film far more generic than the romantic epic Dieterle was aiming for.
Dieterle’s final Hollywood film, 1957’s OMAR KHAYYAM, defeats him, but you don’t blame him. The script is devoid of conflict, and lead Cornel Wilde is miscast. (Wilde had been successfully expanding his range, growing more sullen and sadistic in films like The Big Combo and Storm Fear, but “poet“ and “scientist” were never going to be words that came to mind when you thought of him.) It’s the dullest film of Dieterle’s 52 Hollywood efforts — a chore to sit through, with only Michael Rennie, Joan Taylor and John Derek providing a little pep. And the film that precedes Omar Khayyam is just as painful — although for different reasons. From the earliest days when his biopics achieved prominence at Warner Bros., Dieterle — an ardent operaphile — had longed to direct a film about composer Richard Wagner. In 1953, biographer Bertita Harding — whose debut novel, The Phantom Crown, had served as the foundation for Juarez — published Magic Fire: Scenes Around Richard Wagner, a rather salacious accounting of his life and work. Later that year, Dieterle purchased the film rights and hired Harding to work on the screenplay. Herbert Yates, head of Poverty Row studio Republic Pictures (best remembered for its B westerns), had recently launched an expansion to permit more large-scale productions — plus the studio had assets frozen in Europe that could only be spent there, and the Wagner project cried out for location shooting. In July of 1954, Dieterle alerted The New York Times that the film MAGIC FIRE was taking shape, and that he was negotiating with Republic to distribute. With all three participants — Dieterle, Harding and Yates — so motivated to succeed, theirs should have been a merger made in heaven.
And it might well have been — we’ll never know. The completed film clocked in at 150 minutes; Dieterle wanted to give Wagner his full due, and there were countless details — and significant operas — that needed covering. But Yates got cold feet; he had little experience peddling full-length features to exhibitors. (Roy Rogers and Trigger used to ride into town and set things right in 67 minutes.) For a London screening for the Royal Family in July of 1955, Yates excised a half hour from the running time; by the time he put the film into wide release nearly a year later, he’d butchered it down to 94 minutes. And with the exception of a few excised scenes that have turned up on DVD, that’s the version that survives. With nearly an hour missing — and filmed in Republic’s two-strip Technicolor alternative, Trucolor, which has washed out badly over time — Magic Fire has become an impossible film to judge.
And that said, even reduced to 94 minutes, Magic Fire manages to make Wagner’s life and his approach to opera accessible to someone with little knowledge of either. We see him in many guises — ardent lover, jailed pauper, rebel, exile, reluctant conductor and indefatigable composer — and through the stirring onstage excerpts from The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser and The Ring Cycle, among others, we come to understand how he revolutionized 19th-century music. (Alan Badel, as Wagner, is far better here than in Salome; although he retains that irritating habit of staring into space when inspiration hits, he manages the aging process well, and fully captures the burden of being both visionary and voluptuary.) But the cuts make the story maddeningly hard to follow. In one early scene, Wagner invades the Paris home of composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, pleading with him to help introduce his Flying Dutchman to the world; he swears to conquer Parisian society within a year — and in the next scene, we find him in debtors’ prison. It doesn’t seem like a delicious irony; it feels like a whole lot of footage got left in the editing room. The omissions grow mystifying: Wagner boasts to colleagues that his early opera Rienzi will make his reputation (which in fact it did) — then it’s never mentioned again. The final print comes to rely upon voice-over narration to bridge the gaps, and sometimes even that doesn’t do the trick.
But knowing what we do of Dieterle, it’s reasonable to assume that the connective tissue was handled with as much care as the highlights reel, and that the supporting characters were developed beyond the rather one-dimensional portraits we see here. The colors may be faded, but the compositions are lovely. (The film reunited Dieterle with cinematographer Ernest Haller, with whom he’d last worked over twenty years earlier.) Given the breadth of the location shooting, one can’t help but feel that if the original print could be properly remastered (as with some of Republic’s other Trucolor films of that era: Sunset in the West, The Singing Gun), Magic Fire would equal the best of Dieterle’s films in sheer beauty. And it’s likely, too, that Wagner’s “lightbulb moments” — as when he’s noodling at the piano at the estate of his patroness Mathilde Wesendonk and stumbles upon the “Tristan chord” — would be a lot less campy if they weren’t stacked back-to-back over an abbreviated runtime.
What’s hardest to determine is if the synergy between director and subject matter that elevated so many Dieterle pics is present here. Was Dieterle by the mid-’50s still able to dig into the pains of the artistic process as fully as in Portrait of Jennie, or convey how musical upheavals can upend social norms as in Syncopation, or show the way a man’s delusions can lead him to deliverance as in Juarez? Did his reverence for a fellow artist keep his own sensibilities in check, as on The Life of Emile Zola, or was he able to bring his full passion to bear on theirs, as — for example — Vincent Minnelli did that same year in the Vincent van Gogh biopic Lust for Life? Unless the lost footage is miraculously found and the color palette restored, Magic Fire — one of Dieterle’s most personal projects — seems likely to remain one of his most underappreciated films: derided by all but devout opera fans for its perceived clumsy story-telling, washed-out look and cardboard characters.
And so I’m inserting a note of hope into one of Dieterle’s greatest disappointments. But perhaps that’s appropriate. In his final years, as Dieterle reflected on his ostracism from Hollywood — and the ensuing mischaracterization of his work — he could hardly have imagined the reassessment to come. Even if you merely peruse IMDb’s “user reviews,” you see a marked change in the perception of Dieterle over the last decade, as audiences get a sense of his full body of work, and wonder at the variety, achievement and consistency. They’ve come to see how his reputation has been damaged by presumptions made decades after his films were released — presumptions that, when they were made, there was no way of discounting, but that have proven to be untrue: that his financial failures were artistically unsound; that his most acclaimed films contained his most representative work; and that because he wasn’t drawn to a particular genre — or more accurately, because he was adept at so many — he didn’t have a recognizable style or aesthetic. Review by review, you see IMDb and Letterboxd users feeling a need to right a wrong, to ensure that Dieterle regains the recognition he once enjoyed.
Bloggers and online critics have proven crucial in this respect. In her recent write-up of This Love of Ours, Moira Finnie notes, “William Dieterle, despite his skilled work on such classics of romance as Love Letters, Portrait of Jennie and September Affair, almost never appears to receive credit for his handling of intimate and delicate scenes conveying an emotional affinity between characters.” (She nails his particular gift for “weaving a colorful but believable tapestry out of some outlandish elements.”) Adriano Vasconcelos, in praise of September Affair in 2021, insists, “William Dieterle stands to me as a director who seldom fails. His quality touch, professionalism and capacity to extract great work from his leads and camera directors is unsurpassable.” Check out Marc Fusion on The Crash or Nora MacIntyre on The White Angel or Patrick O’Neill on The Devil’s in Love for recent reappraisals of forgotten Dieterle films, or José Arroyo at Notes on Film, whose 2020 look at Dark City expertly details how Dieterle’s visual command contributes not only to the film’s visceral power, but to establishing newcomer Charlton Heston as a star. But perhaps film critic Michael Barrett, who applauds Dieterle’s “protean mastery,” puts it best in his 2022 review of the Blu-ray release of The Turning Point: “German émigré Dieterle was one of Hollywood's most reliable and prolific stylists, excellent with actors and atmosphere. He's never quite gotten his due, perhaps because instead of flourishing a strong ‘personality,’ he submerges himself in every genre and mode, from the lushest and extravagant to the most modest and efficient.”
Newer publications, too, have begun to set the record straight. In his latest edition of The Rough Guide to Film, Richard Armstrong argues that “despite earlier commercial success,” Dieterle might best be viewed now as “one of Hollywood's greatest lost romantics.” Had he not been censured in the late ‘40s, Armstrong suggests — quite accurately, I think — that Dieterle “could have excelled with the lush spectacles favoured by 1950s Hollywood as an antidote to television.” Longtime critic Leonard Maltin rallies to Dieterle’s defense in his newest Movie Encyclopedia, urging for a reassessment: “He was responsible for a good many meritorious films that have yet to receive the praise they're due, among them his poignant yet melodramatic ‘lost generation’ saga The Last Flight, his masterful production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and especially the dazzling The Devil and Daniel Webster.” And Turner Classic Movies put it this way in August of 2024: “With his knack for fluid camera movement and expressive, graceful visuals, and an ability to work with actors that was informed by his own acting background, Dieterle quickly climbed the ranks at Warner Bros. to become one of the studio’s top house directors.” To the network most dedicated to film preservation and history, he left a legacy as “one of the more underrated filmmakers who revolutionized Hollywood.”
As for me, I had my own recent epiphany, when I attended a screening of Paid in Full: a digital restoration that was announced as the film’s first theatrical showing since its original run. It played at a local film noir festival (although the film is most assuredly not a noir); because I knew the customers weren’t getting what they’d paid for, I expected them to start exiting in droves 15 minutes in. But no one left. It was Dieterle. It was minor Dieterle, but it was Dieterle — and it held their interest. And it did more than that: on the large screen, it revealed qualities that were not readily apparent on television. On TV, I never imagined all the insight and nuance Dieterle had packed into the piece; his camera picked up subtleties that I had never spotted, even staring at the small screen from four feet away. Diana Lynn was a particular revelation. On TV she seemed fundamentally nasty, despite the script excusing or explaining her bad behavior every 20 minutes or so; on the big screen — even sitting in the back row of the theatre, as I was — I could spot how Dieterle insisted that the fear that drove her character manifest itself regularly on her face. She became more pitiful than wicked; even her worst actions were rationalized in ways that I had never understood. A story that had seemed to easily reduce to “good sister/ bad sister” became instead about two siblings wrestling in very different ways with insecurities, a sense of loneliness and constant reminders of their own mortality.
There were other surprises. I fully expected Lizabeth Scott’s lightbulb moment near the end — which leads to a final mission of self-sacrifice — to garner giggles from the audience; those acts of martyrdom from the Golden Age of Hollywood haven’t aged well. But sitting in the theatre, I saw at once that Dieterle so underplayed the moment that he took the curse off it; the audience accepted it without question. And although visually, I’d always viewed the film as stylish but not much more, there were pictorial splendors that took me by surprise. When Robert Cummings woos Scott near the end (after years of ignoring her), Dieterle indulges in a luscious shot of Scott reflected in the window beside her. Because of how the window is angled, you see more of her face in the reflection than you do in the scene proper, and you’d swear you’re looking not at a mirror image, but at her inner self revealing a radiance she’s kept hidden, from fear of rejection. I’d never noticed it in all the times I’d seen the film on television; now I can’t get it out my head. The screening of Paid in Full only fortified my feelings about Dieterle; I was reminded anew how striking his compositional flair was, and how his actor’s training — and agile camera — allowed him to capture and amplify character beats that other directors might have missed. It’s been over a decade since the reappraisal of Dieterle’s legacy began. Now that revival houses are staging a comeback, perhaps we can look forward to seeing Dieterle rejoin his contemporaries on the big screen, where he belongs.
Want more? If so, I take a look here at all the films Errol Flynn did for Warner Bros. between 1935 to 1950: from his first starring role in Captain Blood to the termination of his contract after Rocky Mountain. I delve into Margaret Sullavan and her 16 films here. I serve up The 10 Best Screwball Comedies here, and The 25 Best Film Noirs here, and some of the titles are sure to surprise you. My other essays are all about TV, past and present, but if you take to TV as much as film, there's an index of the more than 100 TV essays I've written; you might see something you like, be it a drama series or a sitcom or one of my “best of” lists.
Oh my word, Tommy – you’ve done some pretty ambitious essays, but this takes the cake. I’ve only done a quick skim, but just wanted to say congratulations to you – and what an undertaking. Will definitely follow up once I’ve had a thorough read. Just a quick FYI: Love Letters is one of Clark’s favorite films, had we discussed that? It’s to him what Now Voyager is to me: comfort food. So although I can’t promise he’ll read the whole essay, at least not right away – law school is clobbering him – I know he’ll want to see what you wrote about that film.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, you just love slaughtering sacred cows, don’t you? I can’t remember what you wrote recently that was so contrary to popular consensus that I told you you should probably run for cover. LOL You making mincemeat of the auteur theory is something I didn’t see coming. Not that I disagree with you; I’ve always found it stupid. And although I’m not entirely convinced by your correlation between the dismissal of Dieterle over the years and the “inanities” (your word) of the auteur theory, I understand where you’re coming from. Sarris and his cronies had an unbelievable amount of influence in the 60s (and when Sarris got something wrong, he got it very wrong). And yet they did define film criticism for a generation – except, of course, for the iconoclasts like Kael.
As I said, I’ll return once I’ve had a thorough read, but I wanted to mention one thing. Maybe you touch upon it here. One thing that’s always struck me about Dieterle is how good he is with actors. Male actors. And not in that macho way that some directors are. I would say the two best performances David Manners gave were in Last Flight and Man Wanted. I find him hard to take elsewhere. And I think the same is true for Bob Cummings. Is he ever better than in The Accused and Paid in Full? It’s funny: we have that thing we called “women’s directors,” like Cukor (although I’ve always felt that making Cukor the prime example of a women’s director sort of reeked of homophobia). I’ve always been impressed with the nuance Dieterle gets out of his *male* actors – and maybe being an actor himself, he knew exactly how to handle them. And to extract a sensitivity that you don’t see elsewhere. It’s true of Muni in Pasteur and Ahearne in Juarez and pretty much everything Joseph Cotten did with Dieterle. I’m actually less a Joseph Cotten fan than most people, but I think Dieterle brought out a vulnerability that often eluded him. (I’m the only person who finds him stiff in Magnificent Ambersons.) Am I right in thinking that all of the acting nominations on Dieterle films were for male actors?
I had no idea about Clark and 'Love Letters.' It’s one of those films I could watch endlessly, and Philip likes it so much that he patiently puts up with me. Of the Dieterle romances, Philip prefers 'Portrait of Jennie' — and it’s hard to make a logical case that 'Love Letters' is better, but sometimes, of course, logic has nothing to do with why you love a film. 'Love Letters' just gets to me. I suspect it’s the same for Clark.
DeleteI hadn’t thought about all of the male actors who secured Oscar nods under Dieterle. I’m sure it was his own acting skills shaping their performances, and applying a certain amount of humility rather than bombast. The one exception: Jennifer Jones did get a nod for 'Love Letters.' I know folks who absolutely loathe that performance: finding her cloying and precious. I think the way she balances the light and the dark is remarkable; it may be my favorite of all her performances.
Totally agree about Cummings. Such an awful reputation, but in his two Dieterle films, he's excellent. In 'The Accused' in particular, his realization of what Wilma has done — and his ensuing efforts to protect her — are a good part of what makes the final third so compelling.
I finished reading yesterday, and meant to write last night, but the evening got away from me. First of all, I saw your note below about the friend who studied with Sarris, and what Sarris said about the auteur theory taking on a life of its own, and his regret at being hard on some really fine directors. Fascinating to get that perspective after all these years. He sort of opened a bottle and couldn’t get the genie back in! And I see what you mean below about what films Sarris would’ve remembered and had access to when he dismissed Dieterle in the 60s. You’re right: it probably would’ve been things like Zola and Juarez, and although I’m fond of Juarez like you, I don’t think those are the films that best define him. Or that fully define him.
DeleteSarris probably had a very limited view of Dieterle at that time (before Last Flight had been rediscovered, and before Devil and Daniel Webster had been restored and before Portrait of Jennie has been reassessed), and went to town with it. It’s unfortunate. But also, as you say, it’s heartening that the perspective is changing. It certainly has for me in the last 20 years, as Warner Bros. has begun releasing more of their early films, and as so many of Dieterle’s later films have cropped up as well. I never had a negative view of him, he just wasn’t on my radar much. But all the releases in the last 15 years or so have broadened and increased my appreciation. I think if you told me as little as a decade ago that you were doing a giant essay on William Dieterle, I would have thought it wasn’t worth the effort. But now having seen so many of these films, it’s very much worth the effort – and truly, Tommy, you do it brilliantly. It’s a fantastic piece on an undervalued director.
I don’t want to “make my way through your essay” like you make your way through his films - that would be rather pretentious of me, wouldn’t it? - but I especially enjoyed your descriptions of The Crash (which I have not seen, though I love Chatterton), of Midsummer (so many delicious behind-the-scenes details I knew nothing about), Devil and Daniel Webster (I love how you tied it into your feelings about Crowther, which - as we’ve discussed - I share).
DeleteAnd especially The Searching Wind, a prophetic film that no one seems to know. It’s another film where I think Dieterle coaxes a sensitive performance out of an actor; I don’t think I’ve ever liked Robert Young more. He’s not quite up to the dictation scene near the end, but I think he’s effective everywhere else – and especially in the opening and closing. And what a gorgeous film. As you say, the opulence is the point. Though I haven’t seen the film in a while, the moment when they’re all sitting at the dinner table, and the death of Mussolini is announced on the radio, and Dieterle swings from reaction shot to reaction shot - the five of them in that giant dining room, their lives both unaffected yet altered in some very profound way — has always haunted me. Dieterle makes it clear that that moment is huge in a way we don’t yet understand. He justifies the giant flashback to come. It’s what you discuss in your essay, and expertly - that he was a screenwriter’s best friend. He knew how to make their material even better.
This is the War & Peace of Tommy’s essays. Brava!
ReplyDeleteWhen I realized this was going to be about William Dieterle, I was a bit taken aback. This was not because I hold any disdain for the man, but because I truly never gave him much thought.
And as someone who is one of those film bros who read the work of Sarris as a young teenager when I wanted to be a lover of auteur cinema, I can totally admit someone like Dieterle was not someone I looked upon as “canon”.
Having said that, I did acknowledge him as an underrated director and someone who did show more flair than many of his contemporaries. I just think I was always viewed him as lesser compared to his other German contemporaries like Murnau or Lang.
I feel like the biggest films I think of for him are, indeed, Hunchback, but also Midsummer. I suppose Emile Zola too but that’s more just because of the Oscar hoopla.
I do have to admit he’s very good at adapting well to various genres. In some ways, I used to put him in the same group as the likes of Victor Fleming or Howard Hawks though those too were far more bombastic.
“The War & Peace of Tommy’s essays” is pretty much accurate. If I ever start to write anything longer, please just shoot me. This was supposed to be The 10 Best Dieterle Films, but I couldn’t limit it down, so it became the 20 Best, and then the 25 – and finally, I thought, let me just take on his entire Hollywood output. Because there was hardly a film I didn’t want to say something about. I confess, even with the directors I love the most, I would say I’m indifferent to maybe 25 to 30% of their output. And I think that’s normal. Not everybody hits a home run each time at bat. But there’s something about Dieterle’s approach — his delicacy, his restraint, his ability to zero in on the emotional core of a film — that wins me over, and makes me forgiving of even his lesser works. Exactly as you say, he’s not bombastic like Fleming or Hawks; when I think they’re missing the mark, I find them very hard to take. Whereas with Dieterle, even with a minor film like a Peking Express or This Love of Ours, if I tune in, I’m rarely tempted to turn out. He aims straight for the heart; in film, as in theatre, those are the works I most respond to.
DeleteSarris was pretty brutal where Dieterle was concerned. There are a lot of reasons I don’t like Sarris, and that’s certainly one. (I think when he came out with his seminal American Cinema in 1968, he listed Dieterle under “Miscellany.”) But in Sarris’s defense, at that time Dieterle was best remembered for the films that had garnered Oscar attention, and those was the biopics — ironically, the films that played least to his strengths. And of course, Dieterle’s legacy further faltered because — as a film director who was on no one’s radar — studios weren’t quick to release his films to home video. It’s really only since 2000 or so that the majority of his work has been released — just in the last decade Syncopation in 2015, The Crash in 2019, Dark City in 2020, The Devil and Daniel Webster and The Accused in 2021, The Turning Point in 2022 — and as audiences discover more and more of his work, you can see a palpable change in the way he’s viewed. That’s been awfully nice to see.
Ooh, and a quick P.S. Do you knows Love Letters? If not, you need to watch. Part of the premise, as I allude to, is that Jennifer Jones suffers a trauma and loses her memory — and reverts to a simpler, younger, more innocent version of herself. Sound familiar? She doesn’t go work as a waitress in Shula, Tennessee, but still, when I first watched Love Letters, I couldn’t help but think of Knots Landing Season 6. And knowing what a classic film buff Richard Gollance was — this is the season, of course, that has nods to The Little Foxes and Ikuru — I really wouldn’t be surprised if he conceived the whole Val/Verna plotline with Love Letters in mind.
DeleteOh I’ve definitely seen Love Letters! I think I’ve seen about 7-8 of his films total.
DeleteBut I do bet that there is some truth that Gollance was heavily influenced by it.
I know I have seen the following:
DeleteThe Life of Emile Zola
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Story of Louis Pasteur
Midsummer Night's Dream
Love Letters
The Devil & Daniel Webster
Madame Du Barry
Kismet
I think that is it. I might've possibly seen a couple more that I just simply don't remember anymore.
I think you’d remember if you’d seen ‘Portrait of Jennie’; I highly recommend it. Knowing you as I do, I’d be curious to see what you make of an early Warner Bros. Dieterle like ‘Man Wanted’ or ‘From Headquarters’; a better biopic like ‘Juarez’ or ‘Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet’; and a great noir like ‘The Accused.’ ‘Syncopation’ is a one-of-a-kind film, and I know it is not too many people’s tastes, but Philip and I both love it. As a musician, I’d be curious to know what you think. I think all of these films are available on Prime Video.
DeleteI will definitely check those out! I am hoping to get back into the swing of watching older movies I missed as we go into next year!
DeleteTommy, you actually caught me on a day when I had time to read this. It’s monumental. I knew of your affection for some other underrated directors, like Leusen and Mamoulian, but I had no idea you had such passion for Dieterle. I know so little of his work, but thanks to you, I’m compiling a very long list. I know his 40s films best, and agree with you on Devil and Daniel Webster, Love Letters, Portrait of Jenny and The Accused (which I checked out after you published your film noir essay). I don’t know his 30s work at all, although I watched Emile Zola a few months ago when it was on TCM, and was not too impressed. It amused me to see that neither were you! If you don’t mind giving me a few shortcuts, which 30s films of his are most accessible? I definitely have to look up Syncopation, because obviously it’s right up my alley. Easy to find?
ReplyDelete*Leisen, not Leusen. Someday I’ll respond to one of your posts and not have an autocorrect error…
DeleteDonna, it's always lovely to hear from you, and forgive me, I'm going to make this quick, and write more once I've gone back into my notes of "what I found where." But 'Syncopation' is on Prime Video, and yes, as a musician, I think you'll love it. It's one of Philip's favorites. A whole bunch of his early '50s works are now on Prime -- it surprised me how many, because they weren't there just a few years ago: 'Peking Express,' 'Dark City,' 'The Turning Point,' among others. And a lot of his early '30s works are now out on DVD -- they're frequently in sets with other films, so prices can be steep -- but of his pre-Midsummer period, I know 'The Last Flight,' 'Her Majesty, Love,' 'The Crash' and 'Man Wanted' are on DVD (as well as 'Lawyer Man' and 'Jewel Robbery,' which I don't care for as much, although some feel the latter is a classic). I'll shoot you more info once I check my notes. :)
DeleteI didn’t know there were so many of his films I haven’t seen — my movie viewing schedule is now fille!!
ReplyDeleteEnjoy! The wonderful thing is how much of his work is readily available, whereas it wasn’t just a decade ago. Quite a few of his films turned up on TCM while I was researching this article. Many more are available for streaming on Prime Video. And the only one I couldn’t find anywhere available for streaming was still available on DVD, which was his second film, Her Majesty, Love.
DeleteTommy, this looks magnificent. I say "looks," because I have to catch a plane for Chicago later today (for a musicology conference) and can only skim right now. But I know I'll dig into it with pleasure later on.
ReplyDeleteI'm not that familiar with his work, either, so there's a lot for me to get to know. I've seen a handful, but the two I know best are "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (which I first saw, under that title I think, at a rep cinema in DC in 1971) and "Midsummer Night's Dream." I have the latter on DVD in a box with other Shakespeare, and I've come to prize it more and more.
As my movie-history awareness came from Pauline Kael more than anyone else, I always tended to roll my eyes at the "auteur theory" as espoused by Sarris at that time. Kael of course eviscerated it (and him) in that essay preserved in her first book, and he never forgave her for it -- he was even unable to be civil when writing about her death. But she was right of course: at that period the phrase meant something far more specific than "in movies the director is important," which (as Kael often said later) every movie fan knows. Anyway, I'm glad to have my attention drawn to Dieterle like this, and I know I'll be savoring your words this evening, once I'm checked into my hotel room.
Oh -- and "Portrait of Jennie," which I first saw just a couple of years ago and went out of my mind for... rather unexpectedly, as it contains elements that I can be allergic to under other circumstances.
DeleteI was so hoping you’d see the essay, Jon. I thought it might be right up your alley, and had no idea how familiar you were with Dieterle’s work. He’s absolutely one of my favorites, and although I’ve never worked harder or longer on an essay, it was truly pure pleasure just to get to watch those glorious films again and again. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. :)
DeleteI had a lovely chat on social media yesterday with someone who had studied with Sarris maybe 25 years ago. He admitted that he was fairly bemused by the life the auteur theory had taken on, and said repeatedly in class that he regretted how hard he’d been on certain directors in the past, just to prop up his own theory. She said Dieterle's name never came up, but she's a fan like me, and wondered if he was one of the directors Sarris was referring to.
Oh, and regarding Portrait of Jennie, it absolutely has elements that I, too, would normally be resistant to. And yet I quite love it. We should compare notes. As I talk about quite a lot (maybe too much!) in my essay, I think that was one of Dieterle’s greatest gifts, to ease you past elements — in particular, contrivances — that normally would have you heading for the hills.
Tommy, I loved your essay on William Dieterle. The section on Ruth Chatterton was excellent. So many don't realize the extent of her work in the 1920's and 30's.
ReplyDelete"Love Letters" and "Portrait of Jennie" are two favorite films. Superb casts in both. I have heard that Jennifer Jones was a retiring personality. So wished she had sat down with Robert Osborne to discuss her films.
Your writing keeps cultural literacy alive. Which as we are aware is in danger of being eradicated with the recent reelection of the name I prefer not to mention.
Have a wonderful day.
Jim
Jim, thank you so much for the kind words. I confess, I didn’t know Chatterton’s work as well as I should have, until it came time to write this essay. But admiring her so much in The Crash (and knowing about a half-dozen films that she had made) prompted me to check out a half-dozen more. Magnificent actress, sadly largely forgotten today.
DeleteLove Letters is one of those movies I can watch for pure pleasure, just about anytime, and it will soothe and uplift my spirits. I think Philip would say the same thing about Portrait of Jennie. Two extraordinary films: Dieterle at the peak of his powers.
Tommy, this is a magnificent essay. Your husband shared it with our Facebook group. We’ve been discussing it internally, but I wanted to share my thoughts with you here. I consider myself a Dieterle fan, but honestly, I don’t know most of these titles. I’m definitely going to do some serious binging in the New Year. We have a lot of Joseph Cotten fans at the site, so there’s been a lot of talk about him in terms of what you say in this essay – but I don’t think any of us realized how many films he did with Dieterle. Although Love Letters and Portrait of Jennie are personal favorites, I was most interested to see what you had to say about I’ll Be Seeing You. It’s a hard movie for me to get a grip on. The first time I saw it I remember thinking it was, just as you say, slight. Then I watched it again, a few years later, and the level of detail between the two characters drew me in. I found it very powerful. I remember I had given it a 4 at IMDb, and I changed it to 9. Then I watched one more time and I was back to a 4! I’m not the kind of person who changes my mind like that very often, but that movie confounds me, and I was curious what you had to say about it. And I think you nail it. Dieterle makes the movie seem better than it is. There are moments from that film that stick with me, as when Rogers realizes she’s about to step over the state line, or Cotten’s unease at the coffee shop. But at its heart, it’s another of those movies about people saying grace and getting into the spirit of the holidays – and as such, it’s not a patch on something like Remember the Night. But Dieterle manages such strong character moments, he almost convinces you that you’re watching a great screenplay. (1/2)
ReplyDelete(2/2) Because it relates to something you talk about, and you probably know this anyway, I should mention that I was curious to see what the New York Times had to say about it originally. Have you read it? It’s a very peculiar review, in line with what you were saying. Bosley Crowther loved the film - but gave all the credit to Selznick. You would think from the review that he thought Selznick directed it, as if he was determined not to give Dieterle any credit. It’s very twisted. Were there other films like that, where Crother liked the product, but refused to acknowledge Dieterle properly?
DeletePleasure to meet you, Allan, and thanks so much for the kind words. FYI, I too find ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’ hard to get a handle on. I think Dieterle does such lovely work, he convinces you you’re seeing something different — and far stronger — than you are. Amusingly, my friend Tim wrote me privately after I published this essay, making the same comparison between ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’ and ‘Remember the Night.’ And I think the comparison is apt. In ‘Remember the Night,’ the holiday traditions become transformative for Stanwyck; in ‘I’ll Be Seeing You,’ they stand in contrast to Rogers and Cotten’s struggles — and not much else. Parsonnet doesn’t know what to do with the holiday meals, carols, etc., except to play up Rogers and Cotten’s discomfort — and how many times can you hit the same “it’s not like that for me” note?The movie feels paper thin in spots. Like so many films, it’s elevated by Dieterle, but in this case, it’s an unusually high elevation.
DeleteAnd yes, I have indeed seen the Crowther review, in which he basically attributes the success of the movie to Selznick, as if Dieterle sat around on the sidelines. It must’ve pained him terribly to like the movie so much, but you can’t help but feel his glee at finding a new way of sticking it to Dieterle. The only other movie I can think where Crowther adopted a similar tactic was in ‘Boots Malone,’ in which he attributes the success of the movie to the writer, and gives Dieterle a cursory mention at the end. It’s funny: I worked on this essay for about a year — maybe nine months of watching and three months of writing. Near the start of my time watching, knowing I was going to mention Crowther, I took a peek at his Wikipedia entry. It was reverential. Near the end of my time writing, I referred back to that Wikipedia entry and it had been significantly revised, presenting a much more mixed assessment of the man’s work. Perhaps just as Dieterle is undergoing a reappraisal, so is Crowther — but in the opposite direction.
Not to butt in here, but if we’re going to talk the worst of Crowther (at least where Dieterle is concerned - Crowther is my personal bête noir in terms of his treatment of a different artist), I say nothing tops LOVE LETTERS. Tommy, I don’t know how you refrained from mentioning his inane review: “A worse script or less expert direction has seldom been tossed at an innocent star's head.” Really: “less expert direction”? It doesn’t take more than a pair of eyes and ears to appreciate Dieterle’s direction. I don’t understand how Crowther, just a couple years into his job at the Times, managed to keep it, writing hyperbolic hate mail like that.
DeleteObviously, since Clark and I have watched Love Letters more times than I can count, I’ve also checked out any number of online reviews. It’s funny how many of them condemn Crowther. One calls him “the New York Times film critic at the time, who never liked anything.” Another asks, “Did you guys ever hear of Bosley Crowther, New York Times übercritic of the midcentury? He hated almost everything.” There’s a YouTube video called “The Blustering Bosley Crowther.” So I think when you suggest that people are reassessing his tenure at the Times in a negative light, you’re spot on.
Oh, and Tommy, I forgot to ask. You say of Love Letters that it would be easy to read a synopsis and presume it was sentimental twaddle. Those were the exact words Crowther used: “sentimental twaddle.” Coincidence or intentional?
DeleteOmigosh, total coincidence! I’ve never read the Crowther review. I simply knew how dreadful it was, and knew the one sentence you quoted in your previous comment. I deliberately avoided the rest — I love the movie so much, I knew it would just anger me, and I’m saving my anger these days for things I can actually fix. :)
DeleteMy favorite of his screen bios is Dispatch from Reuters. I was sorry you didn’t give it more space, but I was glad you liked it. I think my own reasons for liking it have a lot to do with what you said about Dieterle being good with romance. It’s the only one of his Warner Brothers bios with a romantic element, or at least, the only one where you see the lead meet someone, fall in love, etc. I love the scene where Edward G Robinson and Edna Best declare their love via carrier pigeon, and I like the way their relationship continues to grow. I think hers ends up being a very feminist portrait. I also find it funny when Walter Kingsford shows up again as Napoleon, like in The Story of Louis Pasteur, except instead of being adversarial, he’s cooperative. (I think that ties in with what you said about the lessons learned after Pasteur was a hit.) Anyway, it’s hard to explain, but that film gives me more pleasure than any of his other Warner Brothers bios. I agree that it’s brasher and livelier than the others, but I’m curious what you find scrappy about it.
ReplyDelete— Mary Delfine, from Facebook
Thanks so much for reading and for commenting, Mary. I love Reuters, too; I’ve seen it twice, and I’m trying to remember exactly why I chose the word “scrappy.” I think it’s because I felt there were certain points that were left unresolved: for example, Eddie Albert’s transformation from an inept lazybones into a useful and efficient colleague, which happens without explanation. Also, there are times during the movie where I do have trouble identifying the supporting players – I can’t always keep track of whom Reuter is wooing, or borrowing from, or being funded by. I feel certain details are bypassed in the interests of keeping the story moving along — but as I said, I think it’s a fair trade, as the energy and pacing make the story so appealing.
DeleteWonderful point about Robinson and Best, and I hadn’t considered it, but you are so right: it’s the one Warners bio where you get to see a romance play out, and it’s lovely.
I found your blog through one of those happy internet accidents. I was researching something about an actor who played numerous supporting roles throughout the 30s, and this essay was one of the hits for his name. Really well done overview. This is the kind of in-depth, detailed critical writing that is fairly easy to find about better-remembered Golden Age directors (Ford, Capra, Hitchcock, Wilder, Wyler, McCarey, Lang, or favorites like Boetticher, de Toth, Dassin or Siodmak); I was not expecting to find it about Dieterle, who is so widely overlooked. This seems to be the sort of work that would be welcome in one of our current film publications, or online communities devoted to Hollywood’s Golden Era.
ReplyDeleteMuch of what I now know about Dieterle I learned from this essay; I can’t imagine a more passionate case for the defense. I especially enjoyed your ability to keep it from turning into a laundry list of films and instead create a narrative. You leave us with a good sense of the ups and downs of his career, and his shifts in style – some of them dictated by corresponding shifts in employer. I find it noteworthy that you feel his period of greatest consistency was the decade that followed the termination of his Warner Bros. contract; the studio system obviously had its merits, but it could also be a deterrent to talent.
If I may be so bold, the only trap I think you fall into (if you do decide to take it to a film site, you might want to rethink this) lies in being a little too black and white with the films – and disregarding the grays. It’s always easy, in a piece of this size, to focus on the films you love or hate, and to spend less time on the ones that provoke a mixed response. But those mixed responses are sometimes more telling than the raves and pans. Just my own reaction - something I myself am often guilty of - and I hope I don’t offend.
Todd, I’m so glad you found my site, and this essay in particular — and I can’t thank you enough for your kind words. I honestly wouldn’t even know how to pitch it to a film site — if you have any suggestions, please feel free to send them along. :) A friend suggested I put it up as an Amazon e-book, and I might just do that.
DeleteYour point about my focusing more on the films that I loved or hated, and spending less time on the films that yielded a mixed response, is an interesting one. As you can imagine, it was difficult, in writing this essay, to figure out the proper proportions. It’s probably 30% longer than it should or needed to be, but one thing that became clear early on was that I couldn’t devote three or four paragraphs to every single film — so in places where I could condense, I did. I think it’s not inaccurate (double negative: sorry) that I reverted to shorthand on films where I didn’t have a lot to say — and several of those were indeed films where I didn’t have a strong reaction one way or another. Those would include The Story of Louis Pasteur, I’ll Be Seeing You, This Love of Ours — all films where I originally wrote much more, then condensed my thoughts down to one paragraph, in the interests of bringing some variety to the essay, and letting it breathe more. If I ever do something like this again — heaven help me — I will keep your (healthy) criticism in mind.